Over the weekend, Linus Torvalds, head of the Linux kernel project, announced the availability of Linux 6.12-rc4, the fourth release candidate of the Linux 6.12 development cycle. As an opinionated man, Torvalds told everyone that this release didn"t give him "the warm and fuzzies" because of how big the update was this week. He said he"s hoping for a calmer update next week:
"Hmm. I"m not happy with how big this is - it"s probably far from the biggest rc4 ever, but it _is_ the biggest rc4 we"ve had in the 6.x series at least in number of commits.
Yeah, yeah, it"s quite likely to be due to just random timing of pull requests, where things have just happened to bunch up. Last week, rc3 was on the smaller side, so maybe that"s all it is. But still, it doesn"t give me the warm and fuzzies. Let"s hope next week is calm."
The changelog, when you include authors" names, is 1,018 lines long; that"s a lot of new stuff! Instead of attempting to go over everything, here are some notable updates:
- Improved I/O performance thanks to fixes and improvements for io_uring, a subsystem for asynchronous I/O
- Enhanced stability and performance updates for Bcachefs, a next-gen file system
- Security enhancements in BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) and LSM (Linux Security Modules)
- Updates to network drivers and subsystems, including hardware support for the BCM6846 MDIO and Quectel EG916Q-GL USB series device
- Graphics driver updates that should lead to better graphics performance and stability
- XFS file system improvements that lead to better efficiency and data integrity
- Memory management improvements for better stability and efficiency
- There are sound system enhancements, including fixes and new features for ALSA. Some audio routing issues on some HP laptops are fixed, and there is added support for the HP Spectre x360 16-inch model 2024
- Finally, there are updates addressing issues in USB drivers and subsystems, such as one that prevented the reconnection of certain Bluetooth USB devices after suspension.
As there are normally around eight release candidates, we can expect Linux 6.12 to be released in November.