Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has taken the rare step of reverting a kernel release candidate – after it went sour.
All looked sunny enough on Sunday evening, when he set Linux 4.18-rc7 free to roam: “Unless something odd happens, this should be the last rc for 4.18,” the chief penguinista wrote. Something odd did, indeed, happen, and after nearly two days of discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds made the decision to revert:
I think I’ll do an rc8 with the revert, just so that we’ll have some time to figure this out. It’s only Tuesday, but I already have 90 commits since rc7, so this isn’t the only issue we’re having.
I _prefer_ just the regular cadence of releases, but when I have a reason to delay, I’ll delay.
One large headache involves ashmem, an application-level virtual memory area type introduced to the Linux kernel to solve a problem arising from Android’s security paranoia.
Read more at The Register
