14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced that the second Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch has been released and is now available for testing.
It seems that the Linux maintainers don't get any rest, not even during Easter celebrations, and the second Release Candidate has been launched just like this was another, regular week. It's still an RC and it's still not a stable version, but it's out and it's ready to be tested.
The first RC that was made available a little over a week ago was one of the biggest versions in recent history. According to Linus Torvalds it was huge, but it seems that things are going back to normal with the second Release Candidate.
“And on the seventh day the rc release rose again, in accordance with the Scriptures laid down at the kernel summit of the year 2004.”
“It's been a week, so here's another rc. And while -rc1 was one of the biggest rc's in memory, rc2 looks fairly normal. We had a few niggling issues fixed, but it really wasn't anything horribly worse than usual. It might be a *bit* bigger than most -rc2's, but let's wait to see after rc3 whether things are actually busier than usual. Quite often rc2 is calmer than rc3, with it taking a week for some issues to show up,” Linus Torvalds said in the announcement.
It turns out that the size of the previous version of the Linux kernel was due to an rtl8187se staging driver, which has now been removed and replaced with the non-staging one. It's also likely that less developers sent their patches in time for the integration in the new RC, which means that the next Release Candidate will probably be just as big.
As usual, there are a number of other updates with the kernel, not just new drivers. Some Arch updates have also been implemented, along with a number of networking fixes and filesystem updates (cifs, sysfs, xfs).
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC2 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. You need to keep in mind that this version of the Linux kernel is not for regular users. You might be able to compile it for your system, but it's likely that things will go wrong.