Linux 5.17-rc1 Released A Little Bit Early But With Shiny New Features

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 23 January 2022 at 05:01 AM EST. 14 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Due to family travels Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.17-rc1 a little bit early that marks the end of the Linux 5.17 merge window.

Linux 5.17-rc1 is coming the better part of a day early due to timezone differences but all the major pull requests are in and Torvalds believes it's ready to ship. Linus summed up Linux 5.17-rc1 as, "5.17 doesn't seem to be slated to be a huge release, and everything looks fairly normal. We've got a bit more activity than usual in a couple of corners of the kernel (random number generator and the fscache rewrite stand out), but even with those things, the big picture view looks very much normal: the bulk is various driver updates, with architectures updates, documentation, and tooling being the bulk of the rest. Even with a total rewrite, that fscache diff looks more like a blip in the big picture."

More of his commentary can be read in the release announcement.

Linux 5.17 also bring a lot of new hardware support, prompt support for Qualcomm's latest SoC, a new real-time analysis tool, x86 straight line mitigation handling, noteworthy network optimizations, and much more. I'll have out my usual Linux 5.17 feature overview later today.

I've already been running benchmarks of Linux 5.17 Git the past few days and it's been looking good so far with no scary regressions detected yet. More Linux 5.17 benchmarks on the way.

Update: The Linux 5.17 feature list is now posted.
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