14 DAY TRIAL // A new Release Candidate has been announced by Linus Torvalds for the latest Linux kernel branch, 3.17, and it might be the last one in this development cycle.
Linus Torvalds has just released the latest RC for the 3.17 kernel branch and it's packed with a lot of goodies. It's also probably the last RC in the series, which would make this one of the shortest development cycles this year alone, although it might be a good idea to not talk about it in these terms. We could jinx it.
The Linux kernel developer and creator seems to have had a very quiet week and nothing out of the ordinary happened, making this a smooth ride for all the developers. If everything goes well, we could see a new stable release just a week from now.
Linux kernel 3.17 RC is also known as the last one, possibly
"It's been quiet - enough so that coupled with my upcoming travel, this might just be the last -rc, and final 3.17 might be next weekend. Of course, that still depends on what happens - if we have something scary coming up next week, I may have to delay things. But as it looks right now, we're all good to go."
"The shortlog is appended, but the view from ten thousand feet is pretty normal: a bit more than half is drivers (gpu, sound, iio, media, usb), just under a third is Arch updates (arm, mips, x86), and the rest is mainly filesystem updates (gfs2, cifs, btrfs, nfs). The development schedule for a Linux kernel release is roughly 8 to 10 weeks, and we are past the first half. If everything goes well and nothing out the ordinary happens, we might get to test the final version of this kernel in just a few weeks," notes Linus Torvalds in his regular email address.
The Linux kernel doesn't have a precise schedule and it's impossible to predict with precision when a release will be made, with the exception of the official announcements.
You can download Linux kernel 3.17 RC6 from Softpedia and start testing it right now. Please keep in mind that this is a development release and it shouldn't be used on production machines. It's also worth mentioning that this is the source package, so unless you really know what you are doing and you want to help with the testing, you should leave it alone and wait for the stable build.