14 DAY TRIAL // A fresh Release Candidate for Linux kernel 3.18 has been announced by Linus Torvalds and it looks like it's a little bit bigger than expected. In any case, things are on track and the development powers on.
If you track the Linux kernel development cycle, you'll notice that the devs are actually following a pattern and a rather loose schedule. New Release Candidates land almost on a weekly basis if nothing important disrupts Linus Torvalds’ activity, and more important launches usually occur in the space of ten weeks. This is the RC5, so we'll most likely get a new stable iteration of the kernel in about four weeks.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the final version will get here on time. Many problems can pop up and this happened many time over the years. For example, this version is bigger than expected, even if nothing really out of the ordinary is pushed forward. This is a good example that important changes can be made to the kernel, even if it's rather late in the cycle.
Linux kernel 3.18 RC5 is big, but not all that interesting
The kernel is still under development and the Release Candidates are not considered stable. It's not recommended that users install this version of the kernel, even if it comes with some new features. It's always a good idea to wait for the stable build, which is one of the most critical components of an operating system.
"Hmm. We had a very calm -rc4, and I wish I could say that things continued to calm down, but... Yeah, rc5 is clearly bigger than rc4 was. Oh well. It's not like it's entirely out of line, though - rc4 was unusually small. And the changes aren't particularly odd or scary: about 55% drivers (networking, gpu, cypto, thermal, sound), 15% Arch updates (xtensa, x86, arm[64], parsic, sparc), and the rest is a mostly a mix of netwoorking, filesystem, VM, documentation and tracing updates."
"The changes tend to be fairly small and clear, and about a third are marked for stable. So we still have a few pending issues, but things look fairly normal. We've still got a few weeks to go before final, and the more you can test, the better off we'll be," writes 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 RC5 source package from Softpedia. It you want to test it, you will need to compile it yourself, a feat that shouldn't be tried unless you really know what you are doing.