You can now test the fourth Release Candidate of Linux kernel 3.16

Jul 7, 2014 13:30 GMT  ·  By

The fourth RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel was announced last evening, July 6, by none other than Linus Torvalds, the father of the Linux kernel.

According to the official changelog, which is quite huge, Linux kernel 3.16 RC4 includes mostly updated drivers (SCSI, GPU, USB, and sound), filesystem improvements (mostly Btrfs and EXT), several architecture updates (mostly ARM), as well as various other minor fixes and tweaks.

“Things have calmed down nicely, and everything seems pretty normal. Maybe some of the calm has been due to people starting to take off for summer and (in the US) the 4th of July week, but whatever the reason, both the diffstat and the logs look nice and fairly small.”

“Most of the changes are in drivers (gpu, usb, scsi, sound), filesystems (btrfs, ext4) and Arch updates (mostly arm). With a smattering of misc random stuff. But it's all pretty small. Go out and test it,” Linus Torvalds said in the official release announcement for Linux kernel 3.16 RC4.

Among some of the most important changes, we can mention that the add_device_membership function has been renamed to btrfs_kobj_add_device, “dev delete” should remove the sysfs entry, “dev add” should add the sysfs entry, “dev replace” should replace the sysfs entry, “create sprout” should rename fsid on sysfs, and two null pointer dereferences have been fixed for the Btrfs filesystem.

Several bugs have been fixed and a handful of improvements have been added to the Radeon DRM driver, such as an adjustment to the default dispclk on DCE6 (v2), bapm has been enabled by default on KB/KV and on desktop TN/RL boards, bapm changes only applied to AC power on ARUBA, a module parameter has been added to control deep color support, and three typos in the VDDCI setup for EG/BTC, Cayman, and the EOP packet have been corrected.

As mentioned, various bugs have also been fixed for the EXT4 filesystem, such as a buffer double free in the ext4_alloc_branch() function, block zeroing when punching holes in indirect block files, and hole punching for files with indirect blocks.

You can download Linux kernel 3.16 RC4 right here on Softpedia, as a source archive that must be configured and compiled prior to installation. However, be aware that it is an unstable version and it should not be deployed on production machines.

The stable build of Linux kernel 3.16 will be officially released at the end of summer 2014 by Linus Torvalds and will automatically replace the current stable kernel packages of many distributions of Linux. It remains to be seen if it will be an LTS (Long-Term Support) release or not.