Linus Torvalds today released Linux 5.16-rc7 as the latest weekly test candidate version, and the official Linux 5.16 stable version should be released within two weeks. Since it is a version released during the Christmas holidays, Linux 5.16-rc7 is small and there are no big surprises. Linus Torvalds pointed out in the 5.16-rc7 announcement.
No one will be surprised. This rc7 change is quite small. The statistics don’t seem surprising: about three-quarters are drivers (network, input, sound, TEE, HWMON, RDMA…). It is a bit unusual that some of us repaired a PC keyboard controller (not USB, but an old traditional type), which means that one of the earliest supported hardware still exists and still gets some rare hardware support changes. The rest are mainly some KVM and network repairs, as well as some random and scattered areas of improvement elsewhere.
Linux 5.16 has not made any changes around x86 cluster-aware scheduling to avoid the performance degradation of Intel Alder Lake introduced in 5.16. Therefore, users who use the new Core processors either introduce patches independently or disable Alder Lake directly in 5.16. Or choose to disable x86 cluster-aware scheduling completely in 5.16 by default.
There are many exciting Linux 5.16 kernel features that continue to arrive secretly, and we can see when this next version debuts in January after the holiday.