Linus Torvalds Announces Linux Kernel 3.8 RC3, Download Now

On January 9, Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download of the third release candidate for the Linux 3.8.x kernel series.

The development process is going back to a normal pace or at least this is what Linus Torvalds has told us in the announcement for the latest Linux kernel, 3.8 RC3.

“Anyway, another week, another -rc. A fairly normal-sized one. Most of the changes are in drivers, with the bulk of them being one-liners all over that just remove the last traces of __dev[init|exit].

“But apart from that, there are real updates (GPU drivers stand out - mainly radeon and exynos), and some architecture work (arm, powerpc, mips, microblaze), filesystems (f2fs, gfs, cifs, nfs) and networking (netfilter and sunrpc),” Linus stated in the official mailing list.

He also tried to convince the developers to submit smaller patches in order to get the size of the kernel to a more reasonable one.

Highlights of Linux kernel 3.8 RC3:

• USB configuration use-after-release has been fixed;
• A Kconfig bug in the default cookie hmac selection has been fixed;
• Support for Creative BT-D1 via USB sound quirks has been added;
• Switch "On" and "Off" for "Mute-LED Mode" kcontrol has been added;
• A mute LED for HP Pavilion 17 (Realtek codec) has been added;
• A missing NULL terminator to avoid boot panic on PPC40x has been added;
• Increase the refcount when LAYOUTGET fails the first time;
• The configuration dependencies for ext4 ACLs and security labels have been fixed;
• USB ID for T-Com Sinus 154 data II has been added;
• Don't let read-only caching for mandatory byte-range locked files.

More details about the updates and the new features in the kernel can be found in the changelog.

Download Linux kernel 3.8 RC3 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it is intended for testing purposes only.