14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced that the second Release Candidate for the new Linux kernel 3.16 branch is now out and ready for testing.
This second RC was released a day early, but it’s packed with a lot of interesting stuff. The development of the 3.16.x version seems to have had a good start and, with a little luck, it won’t take longer than usual for the final version to be released.
“It's a day early, but tomorrow ends up being inconvenient for me due to being on the road most of the day, so here you are. These days most people send me their pull requests and patches during the week, so it's not like I expect that a Sunday release would have made much of a difference. And it's also not like I didn't have enough changes for making an rc2 release.”
“Anyway, enough excuses. 3.16-rc2 is out, and contains the usual assortment of fixes all over the map. The most unusual part at this point is how the sparc changes stand out (at almost 40% of the patch by bulk), but they are basically all just sparse warning cleanups,” said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
Linux kernel 3.16 already promises to features some interesting improvements. NVIDIA, for example, made some important contributions in order to ensure that the Nouveau driver (open source version) will work properly. The Synaptics driver has also been improved, along with the driver for Dell Latitude, various KVM changes have been implemented, and more.
According to the changelog, the BIOS handover on the HASEE E200 is now avoided, a timeout for scatter-gather tests has been added, a quirk for Acer Aspire V5-573G has been added, the incorrect “presence” status has been fixed, an integer overflow when calculating divisors has been fixed, and FBC is now disabled by default on Haswell and later versions.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.16 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. If you really want to test it, don't do it on your own computer, use a dummy.