14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has just announced that the fifth Release Candidate for the latest Linux kernel branch, 3.17, has been released and is now available for testing.
The creator of the Linux kernel and the maintainer of the most advanced kernel branch, Linus Torvalds, almost succumbed to nostalgia. He wanted to postpone the release of the latest version until Wednesday, when it would technically be the 23rd anniversary since the first kernel upload for version 0.01.
The 23rd anniversary of the Linux kernel was already celebrated a few weeks ago and the official date is considered August 25, 1991. That was the date of the first email regarding the impending launch of the Linux kernel, although it would be a while until it got that particular name.
For the creator of the kernel it seems that the date of the first update also holds special meaning, but after careful consideration he decided to do the regular release and just mention the 0.01 upload that took place almost 23 years ago.
Linux kernel 3.17 RC5, what is it good for?
The latest iteration of this kernel is a little bigger than the previous ones, but that was bound to happen, especially now that we are nearing the end of the development cycle. Many developers pushed commits for this release and the volume of changes has increased.
"So I should probably have delayed this until Wednesday for sentimental reasons: that will be 23 years since I uploaded the 0.01 source tree. But I'm not an overly sentimental person, so screw that. I'm doing my normal Sunday release."
"And as I mentioned in the rc4 notes, the previous rc was pretty small, possibly because neither Greg nor Davem had sent in any updates that week. Guess what? David's networking updates came in an hour after I did rc4, and sure enough Greg came in this week too, so - surprise, surprise - rc5 isn't as small as rc4 was," says Linus Torvalds in his regular email.
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.
You can download Linux kernel 3.17 RC5 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.