The merge window for Linux 4.13 is now open

Jul 3, 2017 01:00 GMT  ·  By

After seven weeks of announcing Release Candidate (RC) versions, Linus Torvalds today informs the Linux community about the general availability of the Linux 4.12 kernel series.

Development on the Linux 4.12 kernel kicked off in mid-May with the first RC, and now, seven weeks later we can finally get our hands on the final release, thanking God it wasn't one of those kernel releases that get eight RCs instead of seven. A lot of great improvements, new hardware support, and new security features were added during all this time, which makes it one of biggest releases, after Linux 4.9.

"As mentioned in the various RC announcements, 4.12 is one of the bigger releases historically, and I think only 4.9 ends up having had more commits. And 4.9 was big at least partly because Greg announced it was an LTS kernel. But 4.12 is just plain big," said Linus Torvalds in today's announcement where he invites users to "go out" and use the Linux 4.12 kernel on their operating systems.

Initial AMD Radeon RX Vega support, Nvidia Pascal accelerated support

Prominent features of the Linux 4.12 kernel include initial support for AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, intial Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" accelerated support, implementation of Budget Fair Queueing (BFQ) and storage-I/O schedulers, more MD RAID enhancements, support for Raspberry Pi's Broadcom BCM2835 thermal driver, a lot of F2FS optimizations, as well as ioctl for the GETFSMAP space mapping ioctl for both XFS and EXT4 filesystems.

Of course, Linux kernel 4.12 also includes a lot of other small, yet important stability and security improvements for various of the supported file systems and hardware architectures, countless updated drivers, networking improvements, and many other bug fixes that make it the most advanced kernel to date. However, Linux kernel 4.12 is now considered the mainline kernel.

This means that even if it is the most advanced version available on the market, it's not yet recommended for deployment on GNU/Linux distributions. OS integrators are recommended to start test driving the Linux 4.12 kernel on the unstable repositories and push it to the stable channel for users to upgrade when the first point release is out, which will make the branch as "stable" from "mainline."

Download the Linux kernel 4.12 source tarball right now from kernel.org.