14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has just announced that the fifth Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch has been released and is now available for download.
The latest version of the Linux kernel has arrived a little early, but it seems that it’s actually bigger than the previous couple of iterations. When the development cycle gets closer to the end, the releases tend to get smaller, but that is not the case with this RC.
“The normal schedule has been for me to do Sunday releases, but this time around I have a combination of travel (which would have pushed the release to Saturday morning from the airport as is oft my wont when traveling) and the fact that rc5 has actually already grown to be larger than rc3 or rc4 were.
“Anyway, enough explaining. rc5 is out there, and while I'd have been happier if it had been as small as rc4 was, it seems to all be solid fixes (famous last words). The interesting dcache list corruption I mentioned as being pending for rc4 is in, and it would be lovely if you have any VFS layer stress-testing that interacts with memory ressure, but the race was tiny to begin with, and the fix actually cleaned things up a lot and removed more lines than it added, so I feel good about it,” said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
According to the changelog, a problem with global suspend on ATI controllers has been fixed, a spinlock variant has been corrected, a segfault in Invensens MPU driver due to null dereference has been fixed, a reboot quirk for Certec BPC600 gas been fixed, Nokia 5300 is now treated as unusual dev, and support has been added for the v5 format filesystems.
Also, a workaround for dropped packets in Gig/100 speeds on 82579 has been implemented, a quirk to disable HPET for the Baytrail platform has been added, a headset mic detection quirk has been added for a Dell laptop, and various architecture dependencies have been fixed.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC5 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.
You need to keep in mind that this version of the Linux kernel is not for regular users. You might be able to compile it for your system, but it's likely that things will go wrong.