A new development cycle for Linux kernel has started

Dec 21, 2014 11:20 GMT  ·  By

The first Linux kernel Release Candidate has been made available in the 3.19 branch and it looks like it's one of the biggest so far. Linux Torvalds surprised everyone with an early launch, but it's easy to understand why.

The Linux kernel development cycle has been refreshed with a new release, 3.19. Given the fact that the 3.18 branch reached stable status just a couple of weeks ago, today's release was not completely unexpected. The holidays are coming and many of the developers and maintainers will probably take a break. Usually, a new RC is launched on a weekly basis, but users might see a slight delay this time.

There is no mention of the regression problem that was identified in Linux kernel 3.18, but it's pretty certain that they are still working to fix it. On the other hand, Linux did say that this is a very large release, in fact it's one of the biggest made until now. It's likely that many devs wanted to push their patches before the holidays, so the next RC should be a smaller.

Linux kernel 3.19 RC1 marks the start of a new cycle

The size of the releases has been increasing, along with the frequency. The development cycle for the kernel usually takes about 8 to 10 weeks and it seldom happens to be more than that, which brings a nice predictability for the project.

"That said, maybe there aren't any real stragglers - and judging by the size of rc1, there really can't have been much. Not only do I think there are more commits than there were in linux-next, this is one of the bigger rc1's (at least by commits) historically. We've had bigger ones (3.10 and 3.15 both had large merge windows leading up to them), but this was definitely not a small merge window."

"In the 'big picture', this looks like a fairly normal release. About two thirds driver updates, with about half of the rest being architecture updates (and no, the new nios2 patches are not at all dominant, it's about half ARM, with the new nios2 support being less than 10% of the Arch updates by lines overall)," reads the announcement made by Linus Torvalds.

More details about this RC can be found on the official mailing list. You can download Linux kernel 3.19 RC1 source package from Softpedia. It you want to test it, you will need to compile it yourself although it's advisable not to use a production machine.

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