The new kernel version is quite impressive

Oct 20, 2014 07:32 GMT  ·  By

Linus Torvalds has surprised everyone and launched Linux kernel 3.18 RC1 ahead of time. A new development cycle has started and it will take a few weeks to see what some of the major features added are.

The Linux kernel project has advanced to the next version and users can now look forward to yet another supported branch that is scheduled to land in eight to ten weeks. It's difficult to anticipate how long it will take, but this seems to be a good baseline. It doesn't mean that it can't arrive any earlier than that, but that's really unlikely.

The first RC for Linux kernel 3.18 landed a little earlier than expected. Linus Torvalds pulls all the patches from the community and puts the kernel together, but he was also invited to Linuxcon and everybody thought that the launch would get delayed. As it turns out, he actually found the time to make it work and now we get to test a new kernel.

Linux kernel 3.18 RC1 is a big one

Kernel developers have outdone themselves and they managed to surprise even Linus Torvalds with the quantity of patches sent for 3.18. Usually, the first release in a new branch is not all that big, but the devs had two weeks to send their changes, and there have been quite a few of them.

"So when I released 3.17, I said that I'd extend the merge window to three weeks due to travel. I clearly lied. Because here we are, the usual two weeks later, and I've already pushed out 3.18-rc1. What happened is that not only did I merge actively despite travels - I was out of communication just for a couple of days (almost, but not entirely, due to flights - the hotel in Düsseldorf lost all internet for a day too)."

"But perhaps more importantly, people seem to have aggressively sent in their pull requests, because rc1 contains more than linux-next did a couple of days after 3.17.. So holding it up another week just seems pointless," writes Linus Torvalds on the mailing list.

The previous Linux kernel, 3.17, was made available two weeks ago and it has already got its first update, but it's unlikely that it will have a long life. Most likely, it will soon reach end of life and it will make way for the 3.18 branch.

In the meantime, you can get this new RC from Softpedia and give it a spin. This is just the source package, so unless you really know what you are doing, it’s better to leave things alone.