Emperor Penguin rates Memory Folios tech – source of that performance bump – as most important new feature in ’not huge‘ release
Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 5.16 of the Linux kernel. In his Sunday afternoon State of the Kernel announcement, Torvalds indicated the merge window for the new release did not include any „uhhuh, things aren’t working and now I need to bisect where they broke“ moments. Work therefore proceeded swiftly, so much so that not even travelling for a few days and using a laptop (which Torvalds wrote is „usually fairly painful“) delayed progress. Torvalds wrote that Linux 5.16 will not be a „huge release“ but does include a significant new feature. „Memory Folios“ is a memory management system that offers „a more efficient and type-safe way to specify ‚head of a group of pages‘, rather than the page pointers and ‚compound_head()‘ and friends“.
