14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has just released the seventh RC in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch, only a few days after the previous one, and it comes with a smaller number of changes and improvements.
As it was to be expected, the new Linux kernel in the 3.15 branch is a little bit smaller than its predecessor, but there is no sign that the developers and Linus are going to make the next release the last one.
The maintainer said that the end for this development cycle might be in sight and that Linux kernel 3.15 could arrive sooner than expected. Right now there is no indication of that happening, so we have to make the best of it.
“It's just a few days after -rc6, but as expected, there were some pending stuff for when I got back home, so you should think of this as being the ‘normal’ release, and rc6 just having been oddly delayed by my travel.”
“The bulk of this is (by far) the networking changes (mostly drivers), since most other trees had synced up for rc6, but there are various smaller things in here too: drm, scheduler, perf, nfsd, afs etc,” said Linus Torvals in his regular email update on the development of the kernel.
According to the changelog, the DCE83 check for mullins has been fixed (drm/radeon), the non-VGA class PCI devices are now handled with ATRM (drm/radeon), several fixes in scan have been implemented (iwlwifi), JIT address randomization has been fixed, the local TT check for outgoing arp requests in DAT has been fixed (batman-adv), GART is now used for CPU accessed buffers, the handling of SMPS for mesh is now avoided at all costs, and a driver for Beckhoff CX5020 EtherCAT master module has been added.
Users won't get this new version of the kernel right away in the repositories, especially in this form. Even after it becomes a stable release, it will take a while until the developers implement it in their distributions.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC7 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.