14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has released the latest RC4 in the newest Linux kernel 3.17 branch. It's not a major update, but it looks like there are a few interesting modifications that should warrant users’ attention.
The development cycle of Linux kernel 3.17 seems to be a normal one and nothing out the ordinary really stands out. It comes with some of the most advanced features that you can find in a kernel right now, but it's still unstable and it will take a few more weeks until the final version is available.
Linus Torvalds is not usually very happy when the updates and commits for a particular release are way too big, and that was evidently clear in the past. For now, the 3.17 branch hasn’t annoyed Linus too much and that can only be good news.
It's been quite a while since any issues troubled the development cycle and we can only hope that this latest iteration of the kernel goes smoothly. We might get the new version without any delays.
What Linus Torvalds is saying about the release
All the releases made by Linus are accompanied by a hefty changelog and some of the thoughts, complaints, and praises from the kernel maintainer. This latest email falls into this pattern and the developers even pointed out one of the biggest changes.
"The diffstat is pretty reasonable, and it's fairly spread out. We have the usual Arch and driver updates, but there's actually more changes under fs/ than under either of those. That's largely due to just a late f2fs update, which I decided I couldn't be bothered to get too upset about, most of it being pretty clear-cut fixes, with just a few cleanups mixed in," says Linus Torvalds.
He explains that he has also faced what looked like a compat layer bug, but it turned out to be a false positive and everything went back to normal. A few weeks back, a bug was found in the GCC compiler and it was spotted in time, but it nearly got the developer to postpone the release.
People must know this kernel exists, but don't install it just yet
As the version number explains, this a Release Candidate, which means that features and other changes are still being implemented. So, unless you are a developer or you really want to have some fun, you shouldn't try to install it.
Odds are that everything will work out just fine. Even if it's just a Release Candidate, the kernel is still tested before being made available for download, so it should provide a normal experience, at least under normal circumstances.
In any case, you will probably not find this particular branch of the kernel in any of the available repositories, so it's very likely that you will need to compile it yourself.
Features of Linux kernel 3.17
Every Linux kernel release is always accompanied by quite a few new features and it's not just new drivers and fixes for various other problems. When you get the latest version of the kernel, you also get improvements across the board and this is also true for 3.17.
Users will get some improvements for the Intel drivers (Intel contributed quite a bit to kernel 3.17), support for some of the new hardware from AMD (Radeon-wise), Intel Braswell audio support, numerous improvements for the Nouveau drivers (open source drivers for NVIDIA GPUs), and more. This enumeration is just skimming the surface, so the final version of Linux kernel should be pretty interesting.
You can download Linux kernel 3.17 RC4 from Softpedia and start testing it right now. Please keep in mind that this is a development release and it shouldn't be used on production machines.