Linus Torvalds might just be a big softie after all. The Linux Lord, infamous for his occasional foul-mouthed criticism of those who don't meet his standards, has just popped out release candidate one for Linux 4.12 a day early so he could give his undivided attention to Mother's Day.

“So I'm doing this one day early, because I don't like last-minute pull requests during the merge window anyway, and tomorrow is mother's day, so I may end up being roped into various happenings,” Torvalds wrote on the Linux Kernel Mailing List on Saturday. Torvalds' release announcements are usually made on Sundays.

Torvalds says this release is dominated by “new AMD Vega10 header files that have all the register definitions in them” and “the new Intel Atom IPU driver”. Beyond those two additions, he says this release looks like “Two thirds drivers, with the rest being arch updates, documentation updates and "misc" (filesystems, networking, header updates, core files).”

As ever, Torvalds is being brief – there's actually some handy stuff in this release, such as a USB-C manager, the Budget Fair Queueing and Facebook-developed Kyber I/O scheduler which will both speed I/O and therefore storage, and increases in memory available to POWER9 and Intel CPUs. This release will also mark the end of the line for Linux on Atmel's AV32 RISC silicon.

Torvalds also points out that “ I haven't uploaded diffs or tar-balls for this rc.” That matters a bit because he adds “Those should now be automagically generated by kernel.org for the rc's, but that also means that they won't be signed by my key. If you really care about signing, get the git repo and check the tag.”

A small change, but one to be aware of for the security-conscious. ®