14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds announced yesterday, October 14th, the immediate availability for download of the first released candidate for the Linux 3.7 kernel series.
Linux kernel 3.7 RC1 comes with a lot of new features, according to Linus Torvalds. Among the listed changes, we find that now the "uapi" includes file cleanups.
“The idea is that the stuff exported to user space should now be found under include/uapi and Arch/$(ARCH)/include/uapi. Let's hope it actually works. Because otherwise this was just a totally pointless pain in the [expletive]. And regardless, I'm definitely done with these kinds of ‘let's do massive cleanup of the include files’ forever,” said Linus Torvalds.
Changes include full support for arm64 architecture, ARM multiplatform code, and ARM virtualization and Xen support.
Linux Torvalds has praised ARM a while back for becoming an upstanding member of the community, but he is still pressing the developers into more work, by teasing them.
He wonders how many years will pass until the ARM developers do what everyone else has done already, and that is to merge back with the 32-bit code.
All this activity on the ARM front means that some kernels can now be built to support multiple different platforms, in one single binary.
The last modifications mentioned in the official announcement are in regard to user namespaces, which are coming back in a workable form, signed kernel modules, and a few cleanups.
“Of course, despite all the above changes, the bulk of the actual patches are still the usual driver updates, which aren't even mentioned above. So the 'big changes' are actually in reality smaller than the normal changes we have all the time,” continued Torvalds.
A complete list of changes and fixes can be found in the official mailing list. Download Linux kernel 3.7 RC1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it is intended for testing purposes only.