14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the second release candidate in the 3.11 branch of the Linux kernel.
The second Release Candidate in the 3.11 branch of the Linux kernel has been released on schedule, but it doesn't pack anything ground breaking.
In any case, Linus Torvalds is always happy when code is being removed from the bulk of the kernel, making it more streamlined, which is just the case with the RC2.
“The patch looks a bit odd, because by bulk 95% of the patch is just the removal of the CSR staging driver that wasn't getting any traction, so the diffstat (and the dirstat in particular) is not very interesting or readable, since that driver removal basically overshadows everything else. But I do admit to love seeing code removal patches,” stated Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
The development for this latest branch has started rather slow and it was noted at that time that there were fewer commits than usual.
“I think the rest is pretty normal for rc2. It started out a bit slow, but I think it ended up fairly normal. Apart from the already mentioned issues, we've got drm stuff (radeon in particular), some driver core fixes, s390/mips/arm/x86 updates, sound drivers, ext4/btrfs fixes, yadda yadda,” ended Torvalds.
Highlights of Linux kernel 3.11 RC2:
• A new GPU codec ID has been added to snd-hda; • The USB block's coherent DMA mask has been fixed; • A missing check for polling mode has been added (s3c64xx); • An alias has been added for the new zcrypt device driver base module.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog.
Download Linux kernel 3.11 Release Candidate 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.