14 DAY TRIAL // The latest version of the stable Linux kernel 3.14.1 has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking the first update for the most advanced kernel available right now.
“I'm announcing the release of the 3.14.1 kernel. All users of the 3.14 kernel series must upgrade.”
“The updated 3.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary,” Greg Kroah-Hartman said in the email announcement.
This is not a particularly large Linux kernel update and it only packs some changes and improvements for drivers, Arch, and other various fixes. In fact, the new Linux kernel is surprisingly small, if we take into account that the stable branch was just released. You might think that developers would have a lot of fixes, but it doesn't appear that way.
There could be a couple of reasons that account for the small size of this first update for Linux kernel 3.14.x. A new branch was made available only a couple of days ago, and Linus Torvalds said that it was one of the biggest in recent history. This means that most of the Linux developers sent commits for the new development branch and didn't preoccupy themselves with the old versions.
The second reason might be the short time between the launch of the 3.14 kernel and the first update for it. It's possible that the next ones will be more productive.
Some users want to have the latest version of the kernel in their distribution for various reasons. Mainly, it has to do with the features and the support for the new hardware. The newer the Linux kernel, the better the hardware support. If you buy a piece of hardware that has just been launched, you might want to consider upgrading the kernel in order to get proper support.
If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.13.x branch, you should consider an update to this build. You can also upgrade to the latest 3.15 RC1 version, although that would not be indicated until it reaches a stable version.
Linux kernel 3.14 features, among other things, better Intel Broadwell graphics support, various Radeon improvements, Nouveau improvements (support for new GPUs from NVIDIA), quite a few Btrfs changes, and even NVIDIA Tegra PRIME support.
A complete list of commits in this branch of the kernel can be found in the official announcement. Download Linux kernel 3.14.1 right now from Softpedia.