Linux Kernel 4.12 Released — These Are The 5 Biggest Features

Short Bytes: After the usual development process involving seven release candidates, Linus Torvalds has released Linux kernel 4.12. Regarding commits, probably, it’s the second biggest kernel release. The most significant feature of kernel 4.12 is the support for new AMD Vega graphics processors. You can go ahead and download the Linux kernel 4.12 tarball from kernel.org.

Back in May, Linus Torvalds released Linux kernel 4.11, which was codenamed Fearless Coyote. It came with scalable SSD swapping, AMDGPU power management improvement, new perf trace tool, SMC-R support, etc. Now, after releasing 7 release candidates, the final Linux kernel 4.12 has been shipped.

In his release announcement, Linux boss emphasized that kernel 4.12 is the second biggest release in terms of commits. Before this, 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 that usual,” Torvalds added.

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For the new version, about fifteen thousand changes to the source code management system have been made. Also, the number of lines of code in Linux kernel is now 24.2 million, according to Heise.

Linux kernel 4.12 features

1. One of the biggest changes in Linux kernel 4.12 comes in the form of support for AMD’s Vega GPUs by the AMDGPU driver. It’s an initial support; more improvements would be made in the future.
2. Switching to the world of NVIDIA, Linux kernel 4.12 brings initial GTX 1000 Pascal accelerated support. However, currently, there isn’t any re-clocking support.
3. Two new I/O schedulers have also found a place in Linux kernel. These schedulers are Facebook’s Kyber I/O scheduler and BFQ (Budget Fair Queueing). The other disk/file related features are XFS support for GETFSMAP and RAID 5/6 fixes.
4. In Linux kernel 4.12, the Intel atomic mode is turned on by default. This setting allows setting the output modes easily and avoiding any ugly situation.
5. The POWER 9 and POWER architectures now support up to 512TB of virtual address spaces. Improvements have also been made to power management in Gemini Lake chips.

Please note that it’s a very brief list of changes. You can read about them (and others) in detail at Phoronix and KernelNewbies.

Linux kernel 4.12 download

You can go ahead and download Linux kernel 4.12 source tarball from Kernel.org.

One should also note that the final release of Linux kernel 4.12 also opens the merge window for kernel 4.13. Also, 4.13’s successor Linux 4.14 will be the next LTS kernel.

Did you find the Linux kernel 4.12 release exciting? Don’t forget to share your views with us.

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