14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has just announced that the fourth Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch has been released and is now ready for testing.
The Linux kernel development seems to be going on without any issues and all the commotion that was present at the begging of the cycle appears to have settled down. The new release follows the normal pattern and is nothing out of the ordinary.
“Nothing particularly unusual going on. 45% drivers (drm, sound, md, pin-control, acpi etc), 40% Arch (mainly powerpc/powernv, but x86 and arm too), 15% misc (perf tooling, documentation updates, core code). The appended shortlog gives some kind of overview of the details without being _too_ big.”
“There's a few known things pending still (pending fix for some interesting dentry list corruption, for example - not that any remotely normal use will likely ever hit it), but on the whole things are fairly calm and nothing horribly scary. We're in the middle of the calming-down period, so that's just how I like it,” said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
According to the changelog, a compiler warning has been fixed (clocksource), a section mismatch in ppc4xx_pci.c has been fixed (powerpc/4xx), GICD_ICFGR register accesses has been corrected, the handling of GPIO invert bit has been fixed, little endian issues have been fixed in the OPAL flash code, some OPAL function declaration duplication has been removed, full PPGTT with param override is now allowed, kexec races are no longer going back to OPAL, and bus notifiers are now used to set per-device coherent DMA ops.
Also, the Applied Micro X-Gene SATA controller is now set as DMA coherent, a signedness bug has been corrected (pinctrl/TB10x), the arm64 kern_addr_valid() function has been fixed, a deferral race condition fix has been implemented, the definition of IPSR5 has been corrected, Kconfig has been updated in order to include Chelsio T5 adapter, a failure of loading acpi-cpufreq driver has been fixed, and the SEI usage on the old FW levels has been fixed.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC4 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.