Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits and a magic mushroom reference

Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it. "After I had already decided to call this kernel 6.0, a few Chinese developers piped up and pointed out that '5.20' is a more wholesome version of the Western '4.20' internet-famous number," he wrote in his …

[that one in the corner]

this one contains at least one active bug

carefully hidden as a test: you have to find that one to prove you really are testing the new kernel, its line number is the password to unlock the bug reporting site.

[Tom 38]

4:20 is the time that you can go smoke some weed. The fact that the time also sounds like a date gives a day to celebrate the herb, pursue legalisation etc

[Tom 7]

Or just eat the contents of the kitchen cupboards etc...

[logicalextreme]

I don't need no steenking specified day for that.

[MrBanana]

04:20 is way too early in the morning for me to do anything.

[iron]

That is not an Earth date, there are only 12 months in the calendar.

(Yes I'm aware of the USA date format but it's stupid and wrong.)

[Scoured Frisbee]

I think you're just putting the year in the wrong place.

[logicalextreme]

ISO 8601 would potentially accept --0420 or --04-20…

[teknopaul]

It is an earth date.

04-20 is a valid iso day in each year.

Lots of parts are optional in

2022-04-20T16:20:00.000Z

But 04-20 is unequivocally April the 20th

[MrDamage]

Most of the world would like to know, what's the name of the twentieth month?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maryjanuary?

[Howard Sway]

more than half of it is yet another AMD GPU register dump

I understand why such low level stuff needs kernel support, but the bloat of the kernel that results is becoming rather large, as every system that doesn't have that hardware gets lumbered with it. How many IoT devices were there that got kernel support, that lived shorter lives than a mayfly in the marketplace, but are still supported with no-longer-needed code?

Yes, you could build your own stripped down kernel for your own machine if you wanted, but who will? If I had a foolproof answer to the problem, I'd suggest it, and of course no distro ever knows in advance exactly what hardware it will need to support, but it would be nice if there was some way of jettisoning parts of the kernel code that are only there for esoteric hardware you don't have after installation, to try and keep things a bit leaner.

[Updraft102]

Re: more than half of it is yet another AMD GPU register dump

The drivers are part of the kernel package, but the system is not loading every driver into memory... only the ones that are actually needed. The kernel isn't that big... about 282 MiB for my current one on OpenSUSE (for the RPM package). Are you really that concerned about the disk space? It's not that much bigger than, say, Firefox, at 212 MiB.

BTW, downvote is not mine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: more than half of it is yet another AMD GPU register dump

> Yes, you could build your own stripped down kernel for your own machine if you wanted, but who will?

Everyone. It's not like your ARM build is going to have any of the RISC or x86_64 specific parts, such as all the AMD stuff. Likewise, your desktop optimised kernel is not very likely to have support for the components you'll find in an embedded device such a smartphone nor is your phone likely to come with IBM 3590 support.

I suspect you already know this though, so feel free to clarify if I misunderstood your comment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernel 5.20

'Fedora Linux 58', Fedora-Workstation-Rawhide-20220813.n.1.aarch64.raw.xz, comes with "Linux 6.0" / https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/Workstation/aarch64/images/

[Anonymous Coward]

Childish

Just because Musk names his car models S, 3, X, Y or pays $54.20 a share for Twitter doesn't mean that adults need to do the same.

Choose a grown-up number, like something from the Hitchhiker's Guide or summat. Linux Kernel 42?