14 DAY TRIAL // A new Release Candidate for the new Linux kernel 3.16 has been made available by Linus Torvalds and it seems that things got back to normal, at least in terms of size.
Linux kernel 3.16 has had a very rough ride so far and a couple of the releases in the series have been rather large until now. Things seem to have calmed down, at least this is what Linus Torvalds says in the latest email regarding the release of this particular kernel.
The developers were confronted with a number of problems and bugs, but one issue stood put. They had a bug caused by the compiler and this is actually much harder to debug and repair than some run-of-the-mill issue with a driver or other components. All is well now and a new RC is out.
“I'm happy to say that things have calmed down a bit, and things look to be on track. Which didn't actually seem to be the case at all earlier this week - we had what appeared to be really nasty core bugs, and together with rc6 being bigger than previous rc's, I was really not feeling all that good about this release there for a while.”
“But the worst ‘nasty bugs’ ended up clearing up and not being kernel bugs at all. One turned out to be a compiler issue (which is always very scary and hard to debug and very annoying), and it even had a fairly simple workaround so that we didn't end up having to blacklist compilers. Another turned out to be lockdep just being too aggressive, and a false positive,” says Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
The Linux developer and maintainer also notes that this might be the last RC in the series if everything goes well. Linus hasn’t made a promise regarding this release, but if he can, he will launch the stable version of Linux kernel 3.16 this week.
Linux kernel 3.16 is poised to be a very interesting release. 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 RC7 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.