14 DAY TRIAL // Linux Torvalds announced a few moments ago the release and immediate availability for download of the third Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel series for Linux-based operating systems.
If last week's RC2 was a "bigger than expected" one, than this week the Linux 4.15 kernel saw even more patches and it just got a quite bit RC3 milestone, which Linus Torvalds says it's big even by RC3 standards and it isn't a good sign for the development cycle, which could be pushed to the end of January 2018.
"I'm not thrilled about how big the early 4.15 RCs are, but RC3 is often the biggest RC because it's still fairly early in the calming-down period, and yet people have had some time to start finding problems. That said, this RC3 is big even by RC3 standards. Not good," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement.
As for the things that landed in the third Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.15, we're looking at mostly updates to the drivers stack, yet the biggest part are some syntactic changes for documentation warnings, as well as perf tooling improvements. Other than that, there are some KVM, core networking, core kernel, architecture changes, and documentation updates.
Linus Torvalds warns about a known issue in Linux 4.15-rc3
Being a development release and all that, the Linux 4.15 RC3 kernel isn't bug-free, and Linus Torvalds warns those who attempt to install it about a known issue with the suspend/resume functionality on 32-bit x86 machines. A patch should be out in the next RC, so you should be careful when testing this one.
You can download Linux kernel 4.15 RC3 right now from kernel.org or via our website. The next Release Candidate, RC4, is expected next week, on December 17, and we believe the final release could be out by the end of January 2018. Until then, happy testing!