Users will have to wait another week for the final version

Sep 29, 2014 06:28 GMT  ·  By

Linux Torvalds has grudgingly released a new Linux kernel RC in the 3.17 branch and promised that he would try to release the final version next week.

Linux kernel 3.17 should have arrived this past weekend, but it looks like we're going to have to wait another week for that to happen. Nothing really stands out in this new build, but it wasn't good enough for a final release. Usually, Linus Torvalds, who is the maintainer of this branch, waits until he has a quiet week before releasing the stable version of the kernel. That obviously didn't happen.

Delaying a kernel release to make sure that everything works as it should is a common occurrence in the development cycle. This piece of software is too important to let out of sight before it has been properly tested and completed.

Linus Torvalds is not happy about the delay

As it was to be expected, Linux Torvalds is not thrilled about delaying the release of the Linux kernel 3.17 for another week, but he feels that it was necessary. Users will have to wait for a few more days to get their hands on the new release.

"So I was really hoping that I could have left rc6 as the last rc and just releasing 3.17 today, but that was not to be. It's not that anything particularly scary happened, but quite frankly, things just didn't calm down as I hoped for. And while my travel schedule would have made it really nice had I been able to just do a shorter-than-usual release, 'convenience' isn't really part of the release criteria."

"Oh well. This will likely mean that (barring unforseen circumstances) next weekend sees the 3.17 release, and then due to travel, I probably will just delay opening the merge window by a week after that. And I'll be very grumpy if people send me pull requests that I deem inappropriate at this point," says Linus Torvalds in the email.

The Linux kernel 3.17 branch should provide some interesting new features, such as better Intel Broadwell support, a number of improvements for the open source version of the NVIDIA drivers, lots of Radeon enhancements, and much more. These are just a few of the features, but the final version will be quite a catch.

You can download Linux kernel 3.17 RC7 from Softpedia and test it yourself, but you will have to compile it. So, unless you know what you are doing and you are willing to sacrifice an OS to install it (if anything should go wrong), you should really wait for next week