14 DAY TRIAL // The final version of Linux kernel 3.16 has been released by Linus Torvalds and the next development cycle for the 3.17 branch has been officially opened.
Linux kernel 3.16 had an uneventful launch, and with just one exception, all the release candidates managed to stay in parameters. It also had another corollary effect. It prompted Linus Torvalds to say that GCC 4.9.0 was actually broken after it messed up one of the RCs.
“And as usual (previous release being the exception) that means that the merge window for 3.17 is obviously open. And for the third time in a row, the timing sucks for me, as I have travel coming up the second week of the merge window. Many other core developers will be traveling too, since it's just before the kernel summit in Chicago.”
“Anyway, back to the changes since -rc7: it's really fairly small stuff randomly all over, with a third being architecture updates, a third drivers, and a third ‘misc’ (mainly mm and networking). The architecture stuff is small ARM updates (mostly DT), some x86 Xen fixups, some random small powerpc things. The shortlog gives a good idea of what kind of stuff it all is, but it's really just 83 commits (plus merges and the release commit) and about a third of them are marked for stable,” says Linus Torvalds in an email.
According to the changelog, a failure to obtain transaction descriptor has been fixed, a leak on failure path in gigaset_probe() has been corrected, the Tegra Git URL has been updated, espfix64 is no longer invoked on XEN, an AIO regression has been fixed, the client UUID is now correctly assembled, a crash that occurred during TSO tunneling has been fixed, IP identifiers are now less predictable, the L2 address in Hi3620 has been fixed, and the damage caused by idmap to virtual memory layout has been reduced.
Also, the demux table creation has been fixed, the MMCR2 handling for EBB has been corrected, the SD2CKCR register address has been fixed, and the installation of AH IPsec SAs is now working as it should.
Linux kernel 3.16 is a very interesting release. NVIDIA, for example, has made some important contributions in order to ensure that the Nouveau driver (open source version) will work properly. The Synaptics driver has also been improved along with the driver for Dell Latitude, various KVM changes have been implemented, and more.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.16 right now from Softpedia.