Linus Torvalds warned users about identifying a critical problem in the experimental release of the 5.12-rc1 kernel, advised against installing for testing this version and renamed the Git tag “v5.12-rc1” to “v5.12-rc1-dontuse”. The problem manifests itself when using a paging file and can lead to data corruption in the file system in which this file is located.
In particular, the changes proposed in 5.12-rc1 disrupted the normal work with the paging file and led to the loss of the start offset of the paging data in the file system, which led to disastrous results – rubbing the file system contents with random paging data. The problem only affects systems with a swapfile and does not appear when a separate disk partition is used to swap.