He lives in Portland, Oregon and the six-day power outage did not let him tend to the kernel.
Due to winter weather conditions and unwanted power cuts in Portland, Oregon, Torvalds reportedly decided to call this version the “Frozen Wasteland” core.
We have now had two unusual merge windows in a row. First we had the holiday season, and this time around the Portland area had over a quarter million people without electricity. We had a winter ice storm that took down thousands of trees, and lots of electricity lines,
wrote Torvalds
Torvalds, who has in the past said he does more email than coding these days, congratulated contributors for being “actually very good about sending in their pull requests” in demanding times for the Linux kernel creator.
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
Linux 5.12-rc1 removes support for many older ARM-on-Chip (SoC) systems, which have not been updated since the mid-2010s, and also adds some new features.
Among the great new features of version 5.12 are “Clang Link-Time Optimizations”. It improves the performance of compilers, and support for Intel’s eASIC NX5 silicon, which aims to offer an alternative to FPGAs in peripheral and cloud applications.
As per the report by Phoronix, the stable Linux 5.12 release should occur in April-May.
