14 DAY TRIAL // Linux Kernel 3.18 RC4 has been announced by Linus Torvalds and it brings the development cycle halfway for this latest branch of the kernel if everything goes according to plan.
The current development cycle for the Linux kernel has been rather uneventful, and that is actually a good thing. The quiet and polite emails from Linus Torvalds indicate that things are on track and that we should have a new and stable version of the kernel pretty soon. Until now, all the RCs have been fitting into the regular patterns and nothing really stands out.
In any case, if you want to check the new kernel, you are free to do so, although you won't find it in any repositories and you will have to compile it yourself. It should be stable enough for regular users, but it is still in development and people are bound to find issues with it. Unless you really know what you are doing, getting this as your daily build is not recommended.
Linux Kernel 3.18 RC4 is exciting and boring at the same time
The current development release is mostly made of drivers and architecture patches, which are not the most exciting features, but it takes us a little closer to the final version. With that in mind, please note that Linus said a while ago that he was thinking about making an ultra-stable version after 3.19, with the 4.0 version number, so getting the current iteration out of the way will bring us closer to that particular goal.
"Hey, things are finally calming down. In fact, it looked *really* calm until yesterday, at which point some people clearly realized 'hey, I should push my stuff to Linus so that it makes it into -rc4', and then a third of all changes came in the last day, but despite that, rc4 finally looks like things are falling into place, and we'll get to stabilize this release after all. Here's to hoping the trend holds..."
"Things look fairly normal. A bit over half is drivers, and almost a third is architecture patches (arm, powerpc, mips and s390). The rest is a few filesystem updates (mainly XFS) and misc random stuff," writes Linus Torvalds in this regular email address.
You can download Linux Kernel 3.18 RC4 from Softpedia. Keep in mind that this is the source code and it needs to be compiled. Alternatively, you could wait a few more weeks until the final version is made available.