14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the seventh and possibly the last Release Candidate in the 3.14 branch of the kernel, making this development cycle one of the shortest in the past year.
The development of the 3.14 branch of the Linux kernel has been very smooth, and it seems that there is no need to have more than seven Release Candidates. Keep in mind that some of the previous versions of the kernel have had some rather long development cycles and they even managed to get twelve Release Candidates out the door.
Linus Torvalds explained that RC6 was not exactly what he had been expecting to have so late in the cycle and that it was way too big. By contrast, RC7 is a lot smaller and organized, which makes the Linux maintainer a lot happier.
“What a difference a week makes. In a good way. A week ago, cutting rc6, I was not a happy person: the release had much too much noise in it, and I felt that an rc8 and even an rc9 might well be a real possibility,” said Torvalds in the official mailing list.
Dragging the development of a certain branch of the Linux kernel is not something that developers wish for and many users have been waiting for the 3.14 release due to the number of features that have been implemented. It will be probably picked up by many Linux distributions.
Linux kernel 3.14 will feature better Intel Broadwell graphics support, various Radeon improvements, Nouveau improvements (support for new GPUs from NVIDIA), quite a few Btrfs changes, and even NVIDIA Tegra PRIME support. And this is just a small portion of the final feature list.
People are also waiting for 3.14 to come out because they are eager to get through the next set of RCs and releases because Linus Torvalds promised an “ultra stable” 4.0 version, which might get here after Linux kernel 3.19.
“Now, things might change, and maybe next week ends up being another ugly week, but with some luck that won't happen and this is the last rc,” also said Linus Torvalds.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.14 Release Candidate 7 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.