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It’s that time of the year again when we have to say goodbye to another Linux kernel series, in this case Linux 5.12, which has now reached end of life and will no longer be supported upstream.
Renowned kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today on the Linux kernel mailing-list the release of several kernel updates, including Linux 5.12.19, which is the last in the Linux 5.12 kernel series.
Released about three months ago, Linux kernel 5.12 introduced lots of goodies, including support for Playstation 5 DualSense and Nintendo 64 game controllers, eMMC inline encryption support, support for the Lenovo IdeaPad platform profile and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet Gen 2, as well as a new memory-debugging tool called KFENCE.
It also introduced initial support for zoned block devices to the Btrfs file system, LTO in Clang support, AMDGPU Freesync HDMI support, and many other cool features, but it’s now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website, which means that it will no longer receive support upstream and that you must upgrade to a newer or LTS kernel as soon as possible.
“Note, this is the LAST 5.12.y kernel release. This kernel branch is now end-of-life. Please move to 5.13.y at this point in time,” said Greg Kroah-Hartman.
If you’re looking for bleeding-edge features, I highly recommend upgrading to Linux kernel 5.13, but if stability is your main concern you should stick to one of the many supported LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel series that you can download from kernel.org or your distro’s repositories. Of course, if you upgrade to Linux kernel 5.13, you’ll enjoy all of Linux 5.12’s features and much more!
Last updated 3 years ago
