Realtime was released after 20 years
SCHED_EXT was merged! Sched_ext Merged For Linux 6.12 - Scheduling Policies As BPF Programs - Phoronix
THIS RELEASE SHOULD BE A LTS
IO_uring async discard support, Applications can now issue async discards rather than blocking sync ioctl discards. On slower storage devices this async discard support can make a big impact on performance follow link for example IO_uring Async Discard Submitted For Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
-Optimization for Raid 5 and better reporting (Report failed arrays as broken in mdstat) [GIT PULL] Block updates for 6.12-rc - Jens Axboe
-The namespace filesystem (nsfs) has gained the ability to provide more information about mount namespaces; see this commit for details
Intel now out of the "Family 6" era as they will change the family id and not only the model like they should have done after P6 micro-architecture. (Pentium pro→1995)Linux 6.12 Finishing The Transition For Moving Intel CPUs Past The "Family 6" Era - Phoronix
added model id for Panther Lake (2025) and Diamond Rapids (late 2025) fun fact, Diamond rapids is xeon with LGA 9324... yes 9324 pins XD Intel Panther Lake Diamond Rapids Model IDs Added For Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
Panther lake also has very small initial push for drivers Intel LPSS Driver Adds Panther Lake Support In Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
Efficiency Latency Control (ELC) better power efficiency for SOC, XEON things...
Structural Based Functional Test at Field (SBAF) was added for better testing of new XEON CPU
enhanced support for E/P cores without Hyper-Threading scheduler now is better able to handle and understand that it has a asymmetrical CPU.Linux 6.12 To Enhance The Hybrid P/E Core Experience On Intel Lunar Lake - Phoronix
-Adds to perf tool, mostly Last Branch Record stuff Intel TPEBS LBR Event Logging Supported By Linux 6.12 With Perf Tools - Phoronix
-fast perf/probing (uretprobes) Linux 6.12 Perf Updates Bring Intel Lunar Lake Arrow Lake Additions - Phoronix
The AMD P-State driver has reworked its calculations for AMD boost and AMD Preferred Core detection. Many Intel AMD Power Management Improvements For Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
The Run-Time Average Power Limiting (RAPL) code also has AMD Family 1Ah "Zen 5" CPU detection that is needed for power monitoring of AMD Zen 5 processors.
support AMD's Bus Lock Trap ^8e0230
added BGRT Better boot splash screen integration for systems/motherboards having a logo to display as part of the boot process.
LoongArch KVM To Speed-Up ARM/x86 Binary Translation. Binary translation is accelerated by adding four scratch registers, x86/ARM eflags, and x87 FPU stack pointer support. LoongArch KVM To Speed-Up ARM/x86 Binary Translation - Phoronix
supports Linux's Generic CPU Vulnerabilities Reporting. along with riscV
added a new instruction SVVPTC RISC-V Wires Up More Kernel Features With Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
-Support Arm's Permission Overlay Extension, protects some memory region Linux 6.12 To Support Arm's Permission Overlay Extension - Phoronix
enabled Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics and Battlemage by default following the 6.11 initial support.
HWMON can display fan speed with Intel discrete graphics cards Intel Graphics Driver With Linux 6.12 Will Finally Report Fan Speeds - Phoronix
Panther Lake (2025) support for HDMI audio Intel Panther Lake HDMI Audio Support Coming With Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
clear out legacy audio Intel drivers that were deprecated by the newer Intel AVS audio drivers. replacing Broxton, Kabylake, Skylake, and Cannonlake era driver (2015-2018) Legacy Intel Sound Driver Support Being Removed In Linux 6.12, Other Big Changes - Phoronix
continued work on RDNA4 / GFX12 (2025) hardware support, remember in 6.11 it was good enough to be enabled by default.
OverDrive overclocking support for SMU 14.x hardware, couldn't find which hardware that is!
general work on AMDGPU/AMDKFD.
Now part of the DRM Optionally Display A QR Code During Kernel Panics, and yes, its in rust XD Linux 6.12 To Optionally Display A QR Code During Kernel Panics - Phoronix
NVIDIA Mellanox "mlx5" driver adding multi-path PCI support (Remote direct memory access). (For ConnectX®-5 EN Card) Allows allow cluster of computer to look at each other memory.
NVIDIA's (engineer) Jason Gunthorpe (Canadian BTW) as:
> "The new multipath PCI feature is a sign of things to come, I think we will see more of this in the next 10 years."
Support Device Memory TCP, ability to zero-copy receive TCP payloads to a DMABUF region of memory while packet headers land separately in normal kernel buffers, and TCP processes then as usual. TLDR TCP to GPU(or other) mem no copy. BIG for AI! Device Memory TCP Included With The Networking Changes For Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
New rust driver for Applied Micro QT2025 PHY. Rust is making progress in the networking world! New Rust PHY Network Driver To Be Merged In Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
Initial support for Raspberry Pi 5 SOC (Broadcom BCM2712) more work is needed but soon we will be able to use all function of the Pi 5 with the standard kernel.
-Also a bunch of other ARM device Initial Raspberry Pi 5 Support More Snapdragon X1 Laptops Submitted For Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
add support for Native PCIe Enclosure Management "NPEM", is part of the PCI Express spec for managing LED lights and blinking patterns within storage enclosures. The LEDs with NPEM can be used for indicating the storage drive is okay, a special state to be used for locating a particular drive, a drive failure, a status for indicating the drive is part of a RAID array that is rebuilding, another state can be used to indicate a failure is predicted soon of that drive, a hot spare drive, a degraded drive as part of an array, a failed drive as part of an array, a drive that is not the right type for the connector, the drive is disabled and safe for removal, and any other enclosure-specific indications.Native PCIe Enclosure Management Submitted For Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
HWMON now supports The Sophgo SG2042 as a reminder is a 64 RISC-V CPU core SoC clocking up to 2.0GHz and having a 120 Watt TDP and handling quad channel DDR4-3200 Linux 6.12 Hardware Monitoring Supports More OneXPlayer Gaming Handhelds - Phoronix
Takashi Sakamoto continues maintaining the Firewire/IEEE-1394 code within the Linux kernel. He's the one hoping to maintain Linux Firewire support through 2029. Absolute Unit Firewire Maintainer Is Looking For Help Testing IEEE-1394 Devices On Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) (pls follow the link its good!) Linux 6.12 EDAC Prepares For Address Translation On Future AMD Platforms - Phoronix
Support for the ACPI CPPC address space. This is to overcome some ASUS AMD systems reporting not being able to change EPP values for power/performance tuning. The workaround is making use of ACPI 6.2 to be declared in the FFH.
-all the other ACPI changeMany ACPI Updates Head To The Linux 6.12 Kernel - Phoronix
-Better laptop support Linux 6.12 x86 Platform Drivers Brings Improvements For Laptops Plus Intel ELC - Phoronix
-Compute Express Link CXL subsystem has seen HDM (Designated Vendor-specific) ranges (Being able to initiate the device with the information given by the vendor)
-refactoring of CXL Mailboxes code.
-Support for The Extron DA HD 4K PLUS which uses HDMI Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) (able to control things like sound and power with only one source)
>This driver adds support for this device, allowing full control of the CEC functionality (each HDMI input or output has its own /dev/cecX device) and EDIDs (each HDMI input or output has its own /dev/videoX device).
>
By using module options you can configure the driver to be fully transparent, i.e. it will pass on CEC messages between input and outputs and automatically configure EDIDs based on the detected displays, or leave it in manual mode, requiring userspace to configure everything manually.
-The Wacom drawing tablet driver with Linux 6.12 now supports high resolution wheel scrolling and also a bunch of other hardware New Wacom Drawing Tablet Driver Features With Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
-ASUS ROG Ally X Audio Support Being Fixed Up ASUS ROG Ally X Audio Support Being Fixed Up Ahead Of Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
-Qnap now more capable of running their kernel QNAP TS-433 Making For A Nice Open-Source Mainline Linux NAS Experience - Phoronix
VirtIO Vsock now avoid queuing packets when the intermediate queue is empty. also optimization. yield great result follow link VirtIO Vsock Performance To Improve With Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
KVM Will Advertise AVX10.1 Support To Guest VMs. so the intel instruction will now show in the CPUIDs when requested by guest. KVM With Linux 6.12 Will Advertise AVX10.1 Support To Guest VMs - Phoronix
Hyper-V code boot faster (66%) with multicore(like 1000 core machines) at it change sequential initialization of CPU to parallel. this is the line that was optimized hv_synic_init() Microsoft Optimizes Hyper-V Code To Boot Linux Faster When Having Many CPUs - Phoronix
-KVM change for non-x86 ARM / RISC-V / LoongArch KVM Updates Submitted For Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
-update to landlock Landlock Sandboxing Now Supports More Controls Around Unix Sockets - Phoronix
vDSO getrandom() support ARM64 (AArch64), PowerPC 64-bit, PowerPC 32-bit, s390x, and LoongArch 64-bit architectures. we are only missing RISC-V. also golang enable it. vDSO getrandom() Ported To Five More CPU Architectures With Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
you can now compile the kernel without specific mitigations. normally you would do the boot arg "mitigations=off" but now you can do it at compile time with some precision. New Kconfig options are added for the CPU security vulnerabilities of MDS, TAA, MMIO Stale Data, L1TF, Retbleed, Spectre V1, SRBDS, Spectre V2, SSB, and GDS. Linux 6.12 Adds Build Options For Greater Control Over CPU Security Mitigations - Phoronix
-New Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) Has uses for eMMC, NVMe, and other storage. was in the works since 2016
The Linux security-module (LSM) subsystem now uses static calls ,instead of indirect call and Return trampoline, for almost all callbacks, improving both performance and security.
-/- More rust support for handling of CPU security mitigations within the kernel. The Retpoline, Straight Line Speculation (SLS), and Rethunk mitigations are now handled within the Rust kernel code. The Rust code also now has support for the Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN), Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI), and Shadow Call Sanitizers. Rust In Linux 6.12 Prepares For Rust Binder, Supports Sanitizers CPU Mitigations - Phoronix
Linus add User-Access Fast Validation Via Address Masking. Confirming that the data at the end of a pointer isn't part of the kernel is normally done by "access_ok()" which as been slowed since Spectre-v1 because it uses conditional branch. the new user access fast validation requires some setup for it to work but uses address masking for the validation making it not affected by the Spectre-v1 speculation barriers. Linus Torvalds Adds User-Access Fast Validation Via Address Masking To Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
EEVDF scheduler now complete, it will faze out CFS in the future.Linux 6.12 Scheduler Code Adds SCHED_DEADLINE Servers Complete EEVDF - Phoronix
Linux/Kernel/Functions/SCHED_DEADLINE server was added and its awsome
"Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor is dropping the "LATENCY_MULTIPLIER". it used to work by doing x1000 the transition latency (the time that the CPU take to change to another freq) and than obviously being corrected by the 2MS ceiling that was in place making it useless. the new system will multiply the transition latency by 1.5 making it more responsive while still having some balance against drowning the CPU with request. Schedutil being here to tell when the CPU should change its frequency. Linux 6.12 To Drop Old Code That Slows Down CPU Frequency Polling - Phoronix
XZ Embedded rework, changed license to BSD Zero Clause License (which is a I'm not liable for nothing. end of it. license) and added support for ARM64 and RISC-V. Updated XZ Code Lands In Linux 6.12 - Phoronix
-_/proc/vmstat_ (Virtual-memory stat)now shows kernel stacks usage (_grep kstack /proc/vmstat_) in power-of-two buckets. nice for optimization Linux 6.12 Adds A Kernel Stack Usage Histogram To Help With Optimizations - Phoronix
after the 6.11 "make pacman-pkg", they added the ability to create debug packages as part of the Pacman package build. The debug kernel builds include the non-stripped vmlinux file to provide debug symbols necessary for debugging and performance profiling. The debug package will be included by default during the Pacman builds unless opting out via the "PACMAN_EXTRAPACKAGES" control. Upstream Linux 6.12 Makes It Easier To Build A Debug Kernel For Arch Linux - Phoronix
FOLL_FORCE Removal from the kernel, (Really good) you're going to have to read the link> May the FOLL_FORCE not be with you [LWN.net]
Sasha Levin (LTS KERNEL MAINTAINER) has announced a new tree that is intended to perform continuous-integration tests of pull requests aimed at the mainline. The plan is for this tree to hold more finished work than sometimes ends up in linux-next; in a name that seems destined to create typographical confusion, it is called "linus-next".
>The linus-next tree aims to provide a more stable and testable integration point compared to linux-next, addressing the runtime issues that make testing linux-next challenging and focusing on code that's about to be pulled by Linus.
Linus frustrated with Bad CPU design with quote:
>Honestly, I'm pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks that have never actually shown themselves to be used in practice.
>So I think this time we push back on the hardware people and tell them it's THEIR damn problem
BTW Linus is now part of x86 advisory group so he'll be able to yell at CPU maker directly.
the whole remove Russian maintainer fiasco. follow the update link for all context Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia - Phoronix
crazy optimization 3888.9% from one line due to some MMAP code that didn't check for alignment with THP
FINAL COMMENTS