After his last week's delay that forced to launch an 8th RCLinus Torvalds He launched last night the stable version of Linux 5.12. This new release of the kernel adds support for VRR, Radeon RX 6000 and for the Sony Play Station 5 DualSense, which I find funny because just these days I have been considering playing some FPS in Linux and my intention is to do it with another Sony controller , in this case the Dualshock 3.
Torvalds has thanked the community for their work, since they have managed to make the week calm and that Linux 5.12-rc9 that he mentioned was not needed, something that he had launched in other versions of the kernel, but that we imagined we were not going to see this time. Refering to News list, here's one that I borrowed from Michael Larabel, who is someone I personally trust and who I thank for the work he does.
Linux 5.12 Highlights
- Processors and SoCs
- Support for SiFive FU740 and HiFive Unmatched RISC-V board has been expanded. NUMA support has also landed for RISC-V.
- The Intel ASIC N5X and the Snapdragon 888 are next to the new platforms now supported.
- The new kernel will prevent premature shutdown of hot Intel mobile systems based on the thermal zone being activated.
- Support for Lenovo laptop platform profile.
- Better support for Microsoft Surface devices.
- The Dynamic Thermal Power Management (DTPM) framework has been merged so that we don't get burned by hot devices.
- Various driver additions for x86 platforms.
- Elimination of old / obsolete ARM platforms.
- Intel MID support is removed and Intel Simple Firmware Interface support is removed.
- Virtualization
- More of Intel's ACRN hypervisor code is upstreamed for that security-critical / IoT-minded hypervisor.
- VFIO batched page pinning for better performance.
- Support for the Linux kernel to boot as the root partition in the Microsoft hypervisor.
- KVM now allows user space to emulate Xen hypercalling.
- Graphics
- Intel VRR / Adaptive-Sync for Intel Xe (Gen12).
- The overclocking of the Radeon RX 6800/6900 series OverDrive is already connected.
- FP16 pixel format support for more Radeon GPUs.
- Various other AMDGPU improvements.
- Adreno 508/509/512 GPU support in MSM.
- Ability to disable Intel graphics security mitigations.
- Intel Rocket Lake fixes along with power management improvements, light color support for Tiger Lake, and other i915 events.
- Storage
- Faster IO_uring and other improvements.
- EMMC online encryption is now connected by following FSCRYPT online encryption and other work that came in previous cycles. The Qualcomm ICE (Inline Crypto Engine) also works with this version.
- F2FS now supports a configurable Zstd / LZ4 compression ratio when mounting the filesystem.
- Many improvements in XFS.
- Performance improvements for Btrfs in conjunction with zoning work.
- exFAT can delete files faster in "dirsync" mode.
- Other hardware
- The Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller was merged and is being officially maintained by Sony.
- Broadcom's VK Throttle Controller has been incorporated for its Valkyrie and Viper PCIe offload engines / accelerators.
- The NVMEM_RMEM driver has been merged to map reserved memory for firmware / coprocessors on non-volatile membrane devices that can be exposed to user space.
- Compute Express Link 2.0 Type-3 memory device support is the initial support for CXL 2.0 in the kernel.
- The Intel laptop hinge sensor driver has been merged to also report the angle of a laptop keyboard when supported.
- Sound support for Intel Alder Lake P.
- The Pioneer DJM-750 DJ mixer is supported by the kernel.
- Many improvements in the network.
- Continuation of work with USB4, as well as security level 5 support to disable the PCIe tunnel.
- Voltage / temperature reports for some ASRock motherboards.
- Improved battery information for some Logitech devices.
- Security
- The IDMAPPED mounts have been merged.
- The Linux kernel now has the ability to bypass Thunderbolt devices that were previously authorized.
- Microsoft IMA / Integrity enhancements.
- The Kernel Electric-Fence (KFence) has been merged as an alternative to KASAN for lightweight memory security bug detection that is light enough to work for production kernel builds.
- AES-NI accelerator for CTS along with faster AES-NI XTS cryptographic performance for systems that rely on Retpolines.
- General
- Software-based audio injection support.
- Removal of OProfile support from the kernel, as the OProfile user space has been using the Perf support of the kernel instead, making the OProfile kernel code obsolete.
- Dynamic forecasting has been introduced and allows a kernel build to support multiple forecast modes configured at boot time.
- The kernel's LED support has been hooked to the TTY layer.
- Instruction latency report for Perf when paired with a supported CPU, which is only Xeon Sapphire Rapids for now.
- RDMA now supports DMA-BUF for peer-to-peer transfers with GPUs.
- Exposure of ACPI Firmware Performance Data (FPDT) to user space for those who want information on hardware initialization / boot performance, as well as during suspend / resume.
- Clang Link Time Optimizations (LTO) can now be applied to the kernel for both x86_64 and aarch64. This is useful for LTO performance as well as necessary to enable Clang's CFI support.
- Support for Nintendo 64 has been improved following the new N64 Linux port released in late 2020
Available now, soon in some distributions
The Linux 5.12 release it's official, but it will still take a while to get to some distributions. Ubuntu will not arrive, and users who want it have to install it on their own, manually or using tools such as Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer. If you do, you have to bear in mind that the updates also run on your own.