Torvalds Warns the World: Don’t Use the Linux 5.12-rc1 Kernel
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Torvalds warns the world: Don't use the Linux 5.12-rc1 kernel:
In a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List yesterday, founding developer Linus Torvalds warned the world not to use the 5.12-rc1 kernel in his public git tree.
Hey peeps - some of you may have already noticed that in my public git tree, the "v5.12-rc1" tag has magically been renamed to "v5.12-rc1-dontuse". It's still the same object, it still says "v5.12-rc1" internally and it is still is signed by me, but the user-visible name of the tag has changed.
As it turns out, when Linus Torvalds flags some code dontuse, he really means it-the problem with this 5.12 release candidate broke swapfile handling in a very unpleasant way. Specifically, the updated code would lose the proper offset pointing to the beginning of the swapfile. Again, in Torvalds' own words, "swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results."
[...] Torvalds' warning matters above and beyond what individual users might do with a release candidate kernel, however. It's even more important that kernel developers not base their own work around that release and potentially carry a very nasty bug forward further down the line.
I want to make sure that nobody starts new topic branches using that 5.12-rc1 tag. I know a few developers tend to go "Ok, rc1 is out, I got all my development work into this merge window, I will now fast-forward to rc1 and use that as a base for the next release". Don't do it this time. It may work perfectly well for you because you have the common partition setup, but it can end up being a horrible base for anybody else that might end up bisecting into that area.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.