Linux 6.12-rc4 is out today as the half-way point to releasing the Linux 6.12 stable kernel around this time of the month in November.
Linus Torvalds has written in today’s 6.12-rc4 announcement:
“Hmm. I’m not happy with how big this is – it’s probably far from the biggest rc4 ever, but it _is_ the biggest rc4 we’ve had in the 6.x series at least in number of commits.
Yeah, yeah, it’s quite likely to be due to just random timing of pull requests, where things have just happened to bunch up. Last week, rc3 was on the smaller side, so maybe that’s all it is. But still, it doesn’t give me the warm and fuzzies. Let’s hope next week is calm.
That said, while we have a fair number of commits in here, I don’t think there is anything _particularly_ scary going on. A lot of it really is just very small fixes, and the diffstat shows a lot of one- and few-liners (but there are certainly bigger things going on too – it’s not *all* those).”
Among the changes to find in this week’s Linux 6.12-rc4 release candidate is MSI Claw A1M controller support for that Intel Meteor Lake powered handheld gaming console, 8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless Controller support, a fix for the Zenbleed mitigation handling so it’s properly applied just for Zen 2 processors, clearing the CPU buffers later in the NMI exit path for better handling the Intel RDFS mitigation, and various other fixes. There is also a fix for Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier handling on older AMD CPUs. There are also more Intel Xe2 graphics workarounds/fixes and various other adjustments.
See the Linux 6.12 feature overview for a look at all the major changes coming in this kernel version for what is most likely to be this year’s Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.
