14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the third Release Candidate in the 3.12 branch of the kernel.
Linux kernel 3.12 RC3 is probably the most banal and uninteresting release in a while. Linus Torvalds has returned to the regular updates, without any incident to perturb the release.
“Nothing really special stands out. There's a fair amount of churn in mm, which is unusual at this point, but that's all reverts: during the merge window Andrew sent some changes that were still being discussed, and we're reverting them for now,” stated Torvalds in the release announcement.
The Linux chief maintainer and founder also explained that he is back to a Sunday release schedule, which means that more regular updates are expected to arrive, just like it happened in the previous development cycle.
“If you ignore the mm changes, the rest looks very normal: the bulk is drivers (gpu, dm/bcache, usb, sound..), with the usual sprinkling of architecture (powerpc, x86, arm, mips) and filesystem (udf, xfs, reiserfs) changes. And some perf tooling. And we had some performance-tweaking of the new lockref support for ARM and s390,” also said Linus Torvalds.
The good news is that AMD has pushed some new updates for their video cards, the PowerPC fan also received some improvement, the function of variable reboot_default has been enable again, various ALSA changes have been implemented, and more.
If you plan on integrating this kernel into a distribution, then you should remember that this is under heavy development and it's not all that reliable.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. Download Linux kernel 3.12 Release Candidate 3 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.