14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced the launch of a new stable branch of the Linux kernel, 3.12, after just a few release candidates.
The current branch of Linux kernel, 3.12, had a very quiet development process, and a smaller number of Release Candidates was necessary before a final version was released.
“I was vacillating whether to do an rc8 or just cut the final 3.12, but since the biggest reason to *not* do a final release was not so much the state of the code, as simply the fact that I'll be traveling with very bad internet connection next week, I didn't really want to delay the release.”
“Sure, we had a number of driver reverts, and there was an annoying auto-NUMA memory corruption fix series, but none of it was really worth delaying 3.12 for,” said Linus Torvalds in post on the official mailing list.
Unfortunately, the next version of the Linux kernel, 3.13, will have to be delayed by at least a week because Linus is traveling and he won't be able to launch the first Release Candidate of the new version.
“So the two-week merge window for 3.13 will start a week from now. You have an extra week. But that also means that I will be doubly disappointed in anybody who then leaves their merge request until the *end* of that two-week merge window,” the dev added.
The Linux maintainer and developer could have released another RC, the eighth, but he decided that it wasn't necessary to delay the stable anymore because of a few driver reverts or because of an auto-NUMA memory corruption fix series.
In any case, Linux kernel 3.12 should arrive in new distributions in the next few weeks, and a few others will start adopting it right away in the repositories (Arch for example).
You can also download the Linux kernel 3.12 right now from Softpedia.