14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has just announced that the sixth Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch has been released and is now ready for testing.
The latest version of the Linux kernel has finally arrived – with a little delay –, but Linus Torvalds has a good excuse for being late with this release, and every RC that makes it out the door gets us a step closer to the final build.
“Due to travels and related lack of internet access, the rc releases haven't been following the normal Sunday release cycle, and since I caught up with what happened while I was off-line, rather than wait until next Sunday to reset to the normal cycle, I'm just releasing rc6 now mid-week from Tokyo.
“With rc5 being a couple of days early, and rc6 being several days late, we had almost two weeks in between them. The size of the result is not twice as large, though, hopefully partially because it's getting late in the rc series and things are supposed to be calming down, but presumably also because some submaintainers just didn't send their pull requests because they knew I was off-line. Whatever the reason, things don't look bad,” the dev said in the official announcement.
According to the changelog, the CPU clock rate setting has been fixed (MIPS/loongson2_cpufreq), the correct DMI tag for Dell Inspiron 7520 is now used, a new GPU codec ID has been added to snd-hda, a missing return statement for (ALSA) has been fixed, the clock driver for 3.15 has been fixed (clk), and the root port in firmware for powerpc has been reset.
If all goes well, the final version of Linux kernel 3.15 might arrive sooner than expected. Usually, the normal development cycle for the kernel is around 8 to 10 RCs, but Linus also said that the next devel version might be the last one if everything goes well.
Users don't usually upgrade the Linux kernel in their distributions and prefer to wait for their operating system to catch up. It doesn't mean that you can't do it, just that a new version of the kernel might cause some problems with a number of packages that are already installed.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC6 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.