In a mailer sent on November 3, Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.12. The latest release comprises support for offline deduplication in Btrfs, performance improvements for AMD Radeon graphics, automatic GPU switching for the laptops with dual GPUs, improved RAID-5 multicore performance, improvements in treatment of out-of-memory situations, developments in the timerless multitasking mode, improvements in locking performance for virtualized guests, addition of separate modesetting and rendering device nodes in the graphics DRM layer, improvisation in XFS directory recursion scalability, addition of new drivers and many other miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

In the release announcement, Torvalds mentioned that the release does not includes the merge window yet. And those who are waiting for the merge window, it is not even likely to be released with the kernel 3.13, as he writes, “I’m *not* opening the merge window for 3.13 yet – since I won’t have the bandwidth to really do merges anyway.”

Sharing the future plans of Linux kernel versions, Linus said that he is not willing to take the kernel versions to 3.20s, hence after Linux 3.19, we can see Linux 4.0. He writes, “And the reason I mention “4.0” is that it would be a lovely time to do that. Roughly a years heads-up that, ok, after 3.19 (or whatever), we’re doing a release with *just* fixes, and then that becomes 4.0.”