14 DAY TRIAL // The sixth Release Candidate for the new Linux kernel 3.16 has been announced by Linus Torvalds and it's now ready for testing.
Linux Kernel 3.16 RC6 was supposed to be a calm release, with few changes and improvements, but it looks like the developers have gone the other way. Instead of preparing to close this development branch of the Linux kernel, the latest release of the kernel is actually a little bigger, which is not a pleasing fact for Linus Torvalds.
The rule of thumb is that when the development cycle starts winding down, the developers send less and less new stuff and focus on the stability of the kernel. This didn't happen exactly as planned and this is the reason Linus is starting to get a little bit anxious to get it done.
“Week by week, we're getting to what is supposed to be the last rc's, but quite frankly, things aren't calming down the way they are supposed to. That was already true for rc5 - it was bigger than rc4. That didn't worry me all that much, because rc4 was really pretty small. But now rc6 is out, and it's bigger than rc5 was, and it's not even all trivial stuff.”
“Anyway, rc6 still isn't all *that* big, so I'm not exactly worried, but I am getting to the point where I'm going to start calling people names and shouting at you if you send me stuff that isn't appropriate for the late rc releases,” writes Linus Torvalds on the mailing list.
According to the changelog, a new GPU codec ID 0x10de0070 has been added to snd-hda, offloads for GRE have been enabled, support has been added for Sharp LH28F640BF NOR, an ID for Telewell TW-LTE 4G v2 has been added, a redundant fence unref in pageflip path has been removed (radeon), and support has been implemented for the Cortex A7 compatible string.
Linux kernel 3.16 will be a very interesting release if we are to judge from the current set of features. NVIDIA, for example, has 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.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.16 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.