After the usual development process involving seven release candidates, Linus Torvalds has released Linux kernel 4.12. In terms of commits, it’s probably the second biggest kernel release. The most significant feature of kernel 4.12 is the support for new AMD Vega graphics processors. You can download the Linux kernel 4.12 tarball from kernel.org.
In May, Linus Torvalds released Linux kernel 4.11, codenamed Fearless Coyote, which came with scalable SSD swapping, AMDGPU power management improvement, new perf trace tool, SMC-R support, etc. After seven release candidates, the final Linux kernel 4.12 has been shipped.
In his release announcement, Linus Torvalds emphasized that kernel 4.12 is the second biggest release in terms of commits. Linux kernel 4.9 was a big release because it was an LTS release.
Linux kernel 4.12 has undergone a normal release cycle. “There’s also nothing particularly odd going on in the tree – it’s all just normal development, just more of it than usual,” Torvalds added.
For the new version, about fifteen thousand changes to the source code management system have been made. The number of lines of code in Linux kernel is now 24.2 million, according to Heise.
Linux kernel 4.12 features
- Support for AMD’s Vega GPUs by the AMDGPU driver. It’s an initial support; more improvements would be made in the future.
- Initial GTX 1000 Pascal accelerated support for NVIDIA.
- Introduction of Facebook’s Kyber I/O scheduler and BFQ (Budget Fair Queueing) along with XFS support for GETFSMAP and RAID 5/6 fixes.
- Intel atomic mode turned on by default, allowing for easy setting of output modes.
- Enhanced support for POWER 9 and POWER architectures, as well as improvements in power management for Gemini Lake chips.
Please note that this is a very brief list of changes. You can read about them in detail at Phoronix and KernelNewbies.
Linux kernel 4.12 download
You can download Linux kernel 4.12 source tarball from Kernel.org.
The final release of Linux kernel 4.12 also opens the merge window for kernel 4.13. The successor to 4.13, Linux 4.14, will be the next LTS kernel.
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