14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced that the fifth Release Candidate for the new Linux kernel 3.16 has been released and is available for download and testing.
The fifth Release Candidate in the series arrived on schedule and it looks like this development cycle is winding down. The new version doesn't stand out with anything in particular, and, if everything goes well, we might get 2 of 3 more RCs before the final version is made available.
That's a few weeks into the future and there is no telling what might happen, but there shouldn't be any hiccups down the road.
"Things are looking normal, and as usual, I _wish_ there was a bit less churn going on since it's getting fairly late in the rc cycle, but honestly, it's not like there is anything that really raises any eyebrows here."
"The bulk of this is drivers - with acpi and gpu sticking out, if only by a hair. It's pretty mixed, really (hid, hwmon, iio, thermal, clk drivers, libata, pinctrl, etc). There's the usual architecture updates (mostly arm, some powerpc), there's some docbook fixes, and there's a couple of filesystem fixes (f2fs, kernfs and ext4). With a smattering of small core fixes (mainly cgroup) too," noted Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
According to the changelog, firmware requests for backlight change on ACPI / i915 are now ignored, SS has been re-enabled on Cayman, support has been added for the Corsair USB dongle, an ID for Telewell TW-LTE 4G v2 has been implemented, Dell Inspiron 5737 has been added to the blacklist, Infineon Triboard support has been added, and the CPU number is now set before accessing MSRs.
Linux kernel 3.16 already promises to feature some interesting improvements. NVIDIA, for example, 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 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. If you really want to test it, don't do it on your own computer, use a dummy.