Linus Torvalds announced the fifth release candidate (RC5) of Linux Kernel version 6.12 on 27 October 2024. After a larger than expected rc4, rc5 is back to a more normal size, with a relatively flat diffstat.
Linux Kernel 6.12-rc5 ships with various fixes and improvements across different components of the kernel, including networking, drivers, filesystems, and architecture-specific features.
Table of Contents
Driver Updates and Removals
A significant change in this release is the removal of the da8xx fbdev driver, which has been replaced by the tilcdc driver.
There were also numerous updates to GPU and networking drivers, as well as fixes for bcachefs. Other notable driver updates include:
- SoundWire driver updates: Addressing issues with volume control types and runtime stream allocation.
- Platform driver updates: Fixes for thermal profile initialization on Asus machines and suspend notification issues on Dell systems.
- drm/amd updates: Improvements for power management, deep sleep status, and handling of bad data from ATIF ACPI methods.
- Networking driver updates: Fixes for the r8169 driver to avoid unsolicited interrupts, updates to the plip driver to address a transmission issue, and improvements to the mv88e6xxx DSA driver for port policy setting and cycle counter accuracy.
- Bluetooth driver updates: Addressing use-after-free vulnerabilities in SCO and ISO sockets.
Filesystem Fixes
Several filesystems received fixes in this release, including:
- btrfs: Fixes for read corruptions, zone unusable accounting, delalloc range locking, and handling of read-only to read-write reconfigurations.
- xfs: A series of fixes related to perag initialization, geometry updates, and error handling.
- nfsd: Fixes for a race condition between the laundromat and state ID freeing.
- 9p: A number of reverts were implemented to address issues introduced in prior releases.
Architectural and Core Kernel Improvements
Beyond drivers and filesystems, rc5 brings improvements to various areas of the kernel:
- Architecture-specific fixes: These include updates for ARM64 KVM, x86 user address masking, and LoongArch KASAN support and vDSO handling.
- bpf: Several enhancements and fixes for BPF, including the addition of a MEM_WRITE attribute, clarification of the MEM_UNINIT meaning, and improvements to error handling and testing.
- Core networking: Fixes for races in network device transmission functions and updates to the XFRM subsystem for improved handling of destination lookups and policy management.
- KVM: Numerous updates and fixes for KVM across different architectures. Notably, improvements for ARM64 related to vCPU creation and stage-2 MMU handling, as well as fixes for x86 memory management and nSVM handling.
Try Linux Kernel 6.12 RC5
As with every RC, I encourage the users and developers to test Linux 6.12-rc5 and submit the issues if you find any. You can download Linux kernel 6.12-rc5 from the Kernel.org website or the Linus Torvalds's git tree.
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