Linux Kernel 4.12 released

Linux Kernel 4.12 has been released, which Linux creator Linus Torvalds described as “one of the bigger releases historically”.

Torvalds said Linux Kernel 4.12 is big, “although the reason isn’t just that there’s a lot of development, we have the added bulk of a lot of new header files for the AMD Vega support”.

Softpedia reported that prominent features include:

• Initial support for AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards.
• Initial Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000 “Pascal” accelerated support.
• Implementation of Budget Fair Queueing and storage-I/O schedulers.
• More MD RAID enhancements.
• Support for Raspberry Pi’s Broadcom BCM2835 thermal driver.
• F2FS optimisations.
• ioctl for the GETFSMAP space mapping ioctl for XFS and EXT4 file systems.

Torvalds said the official release of Linux Kernel 4.12 means that the merge window for 4.13 is now open.

Now read: Linux 4.14 kernel will be a Long Term Support branch