14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the eighth and most likely the last Release Candidate in the 3.14 branch of the kernel, although this should have been the final version.
People have been waiting for Linux kernel 3.14 not just because it sounds a lot like the number Pi. It comes with a host of very important features, and the Linux distribution maintainers can't wait to get their hands on the new version.
Linux kernel 3.14 will most likely feature better Intel Broadwell graphics support, various Radeon improvements, Nouveau improvements (support for new GPUs from NVIDIA), quite a few Btrfs changes, and even NVIDIA Tegra PRIME support. This is just a small portion of the final feature list and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The current build, the eighth release candidate, was supposed to be the final version and Linus Torvards was fairly confident that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, the kernel developers had to deal with a few issues and now the final version of the 3.14 branch has just moved a week ahead.
“I delayed things a day from my normal schedule, hoping I'd feel more comfortable doing a 3.14 release, but that was not to be. So here's an rc8, and I expect to do the final 3.14 release next weekend.”
“There wasn't that much scary stuff going on, but there's a few vfs fixes still pending, and we did end up having some interesting core fixes last week too (not new regressions, but newly detected by Trinity. Kudos to Hugh Dickins for figuring them out and fixing the causes). There's also some networking fixes and random noise (mainly MIPS). So I really wanted another week before release after all,” said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
After the release of Linux kernel 3.14, the next branch will soon get the first release candidate, moving us a little closer to the fabled 4.0 version, which is supposed to be an ultra-stable release. The time frame for that version hasn't been discussed yet, but we might see it in the fall of 2014, if all goes well.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.14 Release Candidate 8 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.