Devs told if they really, really, need more time for merges they can have it<\/b>
\nLinux overlord Linus Torvalds has revealed that inclement weather in the USA meant he recently endured six electricity-free days in his Portland, Oregon, home during which he was unable to tend to the kernel. As a result he therefore pondered adding an extra week to the merge window for version 5.12 of the Linux kernel. \u201cAs you can tell, I didn’t do that,\u201d he said in his State of The Kernel update that announced release candidate one of the new Kernel cut. \u201cTo a large part because people were actually very good about sending in their pull requests, so by the time I finally got power back, everything was nicely lined up and I got things merged up ok.\u201d It wasn\u2019t just penguinistas behaving well that helped. Torvalds said this version of the kernel has received around 10,000 commits. That\u2019s rather fewer than the 12,000 or 13,000 he usually sees. In case anyone was inconvenienced by blackout-induced inability to merge, Torvalds said he\u2019s open to help any kernel devs for whom his unavailability caused problems but is not open to all late pulls. Torvalds rated the new release as offering \u201ca fair amount of historical cleanup\u201d on account of \u201cremoving the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have been using the \u00ab\u00a0perf\u00a0\u00bb interface for years), and removing several legacy SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make any sense.\u201d Among the big inclusions in 5.12 are Clang Link-Time Optimizations, which make for better compiler performance, and support for Intel\u2019s eASIC NX5 silicon that aims to offer an alternative to FPGAs in edge and cloud applications. Qualcomm\u2019s Snapdragon 888 5G SoC also gains support. And who could forget changes that allow Linux as root partition under Hyper-V? Support for PlayStation 5 controllers and the Nintendo 64 are among the usual array of slightly bewildering inclusions. \u00ae<\/p>\n