14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced that the first RC for Linux Kernel 3.17 has been released and is now ready for testing.
This is a very busy time of the year for the kernel team, with various events and conferences taking place all over the world. This means that the releases will be a little erratic, but they will arrive nonetheless.
The first RC for Linux kernel 3.17 is here and it brings quite a few new features and modifications, although this is just the beginning and more are sure to follow. In fact, despite the fact that the merge window was cut short by one day, it's still a pretty hefty release, which says much about the upcoming versions in this series.
“Anyway, this merge window was slightly smaller than the last few ones, probably due to summer slowdowns in the northern hemisphere. Which is not to say that it was *small* - the last few releases have been larger than usual, this one is just fairly average. It's certainly big enough that I can't post the shortlog, so as usual this just appends the ‘mergelog’ where the people credited are the people I pulled from, not necessarily the people who wrote the code.”
“Changes all over the place, but no huge new architectures or filesystems. About three quarters of the changes are drivers, and of the rest, roughly half is architecture updates, with the rest being misc core changes (networking, filesystems etc),” says Linus Torvalds in official announcement.
The Linux kernel development cycle is pretty predictable, but surprises are bound to appear. The previous release, 3.16, followed a normal trend for the most part, but there was at least one instance when the developers could have postponed the release.
Linus Torvalds was very angry about a problem that he found with the GCC compiler and he even considered waiting a little bit longer for the issue to get fixed. The kernel eventually arrived on time, but he did mention it in the announcement.
It everything goes well, the new Linux kernel 3.17 should arrive in a little over a couple of months, but there were a times when the development cycle was prolonged for various reasons. In any case, it seems that it will arrive too late to get integrated in Ubuntu 14.10, Fedora 21, or the upcoming Debian.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.1 RC1 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.