14 DAY TRIAL // A new Linux kernel Release Candidate has been made available in the 3.18 branch and Linus Torvalds is confident that the development cycle is going on normally, despite the fact that a problematic regression has been identified.
The Linux kernel development cycle has advanced once again and Linux Torvalds releases a new version, which brings a fair amount of changes and various improvements.
Even if some problems have been noticed with the new release, they are under investigation and should be fixed in the coming releases. This is a dev release and it's unlikely that too many regular users will actually get it.
The development cycle for a new Linux kernel usually spans over a period of about 10 weeks, give or take. There is only one guy, Linus Torvalds, who pulls all the patches from the community and ultimately puts the kernel together, and he also does that for the latest version.
The ones that have already been released are maintained by other people. This basically means that Linus is controlling the release rate and the features that are eventually implemented, but he's also responsible for the quality of that final archive.
Linux kernel 3.18 RC6 won't be remembered
This RC is just another speed bump towards the final 3.18 version. This release is the one that will eventually get adopted in various distros and projects, and very few people really care about a Release Candidate. On the other hand, this update allows users to take a look at the development process, which is always quite interesting.
"Steady progress towards final release, although we still have a big unknown worry in a regression that Dave Jones reported and that we haven't solved yet. In the process of chasing that one down, there's been a fair amount of looking at various low-level details, and that found some dubious issues, but no smoking gun yet. But that explains some of the patches in rc6..."
"The good news is that things are generally calming down, and most of the changes are smallish regression fixes here, with a smattering of stable patches. About half drivers (networking, sound, pci, infiniband, etc), with architecture updates (x86, mips, arm), and networking code being about half of the rest," wrote Linus Torvalds in the announcement.
More details about this RC can be found on the official mailing list. You can download Linux kernel 3.18 RC6 source package from Softpedia. It you want to test it, you will need to compile it yourself.
