The development for the 3.8 branch is pushing on with a new Release Candidate

Jan 18, 2013 08:45 GMT  ·  By

On January 18, Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download of the forth release candidate for the Linux 3.8.x kernel series.

Besides actually releasing the new development version of the 3.8 branch, Linus Torvalds also tried to put together an interesting statistic about the days of week when the releases are made.

“The whole ‘release in the middle of the week’ thing feels odd to me. That actually got me to wonder what the most common day was, and statistically I definitely do most releases on Sunday,” stated Linus in the official mailing list.

It seems that Linux kernel 3.8 RC4 is a little bit smaller than the previous Release Candidate, but it's not bringing anything big, just a sleuth of minor changes.

“The ShortLog is appended, but it's basically 85% drivers, with over half the patch being to the aforementioned new wireless one and the OMAP drm changes. There's some other stuff there too, but it's largely in the noise - small ARM and s390 updates (and a smattering of SuperH and x86), a few tiny filesystem fixes, things like that,” Linus Torvalds said.

Highlights of Linux kernel 3.8 RC4:

• The test number in log message for USB has been fixed; • Support for more than 2 monitors on nve0 has been repaired; • A typo in setting up ibss network parameters has been repaired; • Wordclock status on AES32 has been fixed; • A device quirk for Microsoft VX700 webcam has been added; • The memory leak in case of device_add() failure for ASoC has been fixed; • Support for "PSC Scanning, Magellan 800i" has been added.

More details about the updates and the new features in the kernel can be found in the changelog.

Download Linux kernel 3.8 RC4 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it is intended for testing purposes only.