The recent icy storms that battered most of the United States left Linux kernel’s head-honcho Linus Torvalds without electricity, holding up the release of the latest release.
A resident of Portland, Torvalds even considered delaying the launch of the next development version due to the outage that left over a quarter million people without electricity in the Portland area.
“So I was actually without electricity for six days of the merge window, and was seriously considering just extending the merge window to get everything done,” wrote Torvalds as he put out the latest release that he’s cheekily dubbed “frozen wasteland”.
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Unusual release cycles
The development of the previous release cycle had to deal with the Christmas holiday season, and this one begins with the fallout of the unusual weather. While Torvalds assumed both would delay the respective releases, none of the events could derail the kernel development bandwagon.
Torvalds credits the contributors for sending in good pull requests, while also acknowledging that the release is smaller than previous release, comparatively.
The highlight of the release is the “spring cleaning” that removed legacy code for systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) platforms and various drivers “that no longer make any sense,” shared Torvalds.
That said, one of the weirdest inclusions in the 5.12 release is support for the Nintendo 64, gaming console, which was released before the turn of the century. In any case, assuming there are no unforeseen delays, the final Linux 5.12 stable should be out in late April or early May.
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Via: The Register
