Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Sunday announced the arrival of the Linux 4.12 kernel, which is notable for its size thanks to addition support for AMD’s new Radeon RX Vega graphics card.
“Things were quite calm this week, so I really didn’t have any real reason to delay the 4.12 release,” wrote Torvalds.
As noted by Phoronix, Linux 4.12 brought over one million lines of new code to the kernel since 4.11 through work on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) for Vega GPUs, new disk and file-systems, updates for POWER9, ARM, and Nvidia processors, a USB Type-C port manager, and some kernel hardening in the form of Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization or KASLR, which is on by default for x86 systems.
“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 Torvalds.