As Linux reaches the 5.16 stable release, this upgrade also includes many new features. These include the FUTEX2 futex_waitv system call for Steam Play and Wine, providing memory pooling (Memory Folios) and mainstream support for AMD Ryzen 6000 series mobile processors, and hardware performance improvements such as Radeon GPUs.
In addition, the Intel Alder Lake S core display function has been stabilized, and the AMX support for the Sapphire Rapids chip has also been implemented. Linus Torvalds wrote in Sunday’s announcement that -rc8 is not far away at this time, and everyone is not surprised. The team had an extra week due to the New Year’s break, but that didn’t mean many things were done at the last minute.
This stable update mainly contains some driver fixes (mainly around networking and rdma), a group credential usage fix, some core networking fixes, two last-minute reverts, and other odds and ends. In addition, when cloc is run on the Linux 5.16 source tree, it can be seen that its code size is about 22.5 million lines, with another 3.8 million lines of comments, and 4 million blank lines distributed in 63,500 files, so the current Linux Git number The total number of lines of code is around 30.4 million.
Finally, with the opening of the Linux 5.17 merge window, we can expect it to get off to a good start in 2022 and bring more exciting new features to the masses.