14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced that Linux kernel 3.15 RC8 has been released and that the merge window for 3.16 has been opened.
It looks like the Release Candidate for this branch of kernel was forced upon Linus because some last-minute changes had been made and more testing was necessary. The Linux kernel maintainer and creator, Linus Torvalds, would have been more than happy to make this a stable release, but it looks like we're going to have to wait another week.
“I was really hoping that rc7 would be the last rc, but it appears that reality is once against conspiring against my well-laid plans, and is forcing me to do an rc8. It's not like there were a lot of changes, but the last-minute dcache fixes in particular made it not really sane to just make a final release without another week of testing,” he said in his usual email announcement.
Surprisingly, this is not the most interesting piece of news from today's announcement. Due to some scheduling problems, Linus is now starting the merge window for the next Linux kernel, 3.16, although the final version of 3.15 hasn't been released yet. This is a first and a sort of an experiment for the kernel development.
“SO... Let's try something new. I suspect most people are ready to start the merge window, and we could try how it would be to overlap the first week of the merge window with the last week of the previous release. Most of the submaintainers already use git branches actively, so I doubt anybody will find it too confusing if I end up having a ‘next’ branch for a week that contains the stuff I pull for 3.16,” also said Linus.
The stable version of this kernel won't hit the regular repositories anytime soon, with the exception of Arch Linux and maybe a couple of others. You will have to wait until the developers integrate this version in your distribution.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.15 RC8 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.