14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has just released the third Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch, which is now available for testing.
The Linux kernel development is going as planned, and it seems that the weekly development cycle has returned to normal. After a couple of crazy first releases, the third iteration of the kernel has calmed down and there are no more surprises.
“Another week, another rc. So far, no big scares, and rc3 is appropriately smaller than rc2 was, so we're following the right trajectory here. The statistics look fairly normal too, with half drivers (input, usb, gpu, acpi, regulator...) and a third Arch update (much of it again arm dts files, but other arm and some um updates too). The rest is misc, but mainly concentrated in filesystem updates (btrfs and ext4),” reads the announcement made by Linus Torvalds in the official mailing list.
The first RC in the new 3.15 series broke some records, and the developers pushed a huge amount of patches and other various improvements. If the trend continues, Linux kernel 3.15 might become even more interesting than the previous 3.14 version, which was quite a hit.
According to the changelog, command result state propagation has been fixed (SCSI), dpm has been disabled on rv770 by default (drm/radeon), the ATPX detection on non-VGA GPUs has been fixed (drm/radeon), “MSI Revert to Single Message” mode is no longer enforced, it's no longer possible to receive interrupts sent by dummy ports (ahci), broken platform_data support has been fixed (at91_adc), the Atmel vendor prefix has been corrected, and missing pipe handling has been fixed (um).
Also, a number of Sierra Wireless devices are now supported (EM7355, MC73xx, MC7305/MC7355), the 64-bit number truncation warning on EXT4 has been fixed, the error code from btrfs_drop_extents has been replaced, more USB deadlock fixes have been implemented, a subdir count leak has been corrected (kernfs), and support has been added for newer Elantech touchpads.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC3 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.