14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the second release candidate in the 3.10 branch of the Linux kernel.
The first release in this new branch has been deemed as the largest update in recent years, by Linus Torvalds. At least this is what can be deduced from the number of commits.
A week later, the second Release Candidate for the 3.10 branch has been released and it's not as impressive, by a long shot.
“For being an -rc2, it's not unreasonably sized, but I did take a few pulls that I wouldn't have taken later in the rc series. So it's not exactly small either. We've got Arch updates (PPC, MIPS, PA-RISC), we've got driver fixes (net, gpu, target, xen), and we've got filesystem updates (btrfs, ext4 and cepth – rbd),” Linus Torvalds said in the official announcement.
Highlights of Linux kernel 3.10 RC2:
• The BIOS initial backlight value for HP 1000 is now ignored; • Incorrect dependencies for ARM SA11xx drivers have been corrected; • kmalloc and strcpy have been replaced with kstrdup; • An in-memory udbg console has been added; • A memory leak issue, that occurred when the driver unloads, has been corrected; • A btrfs bioset is now used instead of abusing bio internals; • The error messages provided failing to enable IRQ has been improved; • A trailing whitespace has been removed in arch/arm/Makefile; • A missing module license tag has been added to vring helpers; • Headset mic support has been added for another Dell machine; • A local mutex has been added to fix the physical CPU hot-add deadlock.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog.
Download Linux kernel 3.10 Release Candidate 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.