14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced that the first Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch has arrived, and it seems to have broken a few records, at least in terms of size.
Linux kernel 3.15 RC1 has been in the making for the last couple of weeks, which means that there was enough time for the Linux developers to send a huge amount of commits and various improvements towards Linus Torvalds.
This is not an unusual problem for the first Release Candidate in a new series. As it turns out, most of the first versions in a new branch are very large, but the current RC1 is one of the biggest in recent history.
“This release doesn't really have a lot of odd things going on, but it's *big*. Sure, we've had releases with more files and lines changed (3.7-rc1 and 3.11-rc1 in particular), but those tended to have something particular going on (3.7-rc1 saw the largely automated UAPI header file disintegration, and 3.11 saw the bug staging lustre merge).”
“In comparison to those large releases, 3.15-rc1 is just big in general. No single big thing, but just lots and lots of commits. Sure, it has a few big new staging drivers (rtl8723au in particular), but even when big, those aren't nearly the bulk of things. There's just a lot going on,” said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
The Linux maintainer also explained that Linux kernel 3.15 RC1 registered the largest number of commits, over 12,000, and they cover a wide variety of aspects, including mostly drivers and architecture updates.
With so many commits and with so many people who actually missed the merge window, it's very likely that the second Release Candidate, which will probably arrive next week, will also be a fairly large one.
This is not an indication on the length of the development cycle and there is no telling how many RCs we will get before the final version arrives. It will probably take at least a couple of months, if nothing out of the ordinary happens or if the new kernel doesn't get delayed.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.