14 DAY TRIAL // The latest version of the Linux kernel, 3.15.6, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, and the new release seems to be a little bit bigger than the previous ones.
Linux kernel 3.15.x has been around for some time and this branch managed to gather quite a few updates in the last few weeks. It's becoming more and more stable, although not too many distributions decided to make it default. It will take a while until that happens, but some of the operating systems are offering it from the official repositories, like Arch Linux for example.
The start of this new branch was pretty slow and the first few updates were rather small. As you can see from the changelog, it looks like the development has picked up some Steam.
“I'm announcing the release of the 3.15.6 kernel. All users of the 3.15 kernel series must upgrade.”
“The updated 3.15.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.15.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary,” Greg Kroah-Hartman says in the email announcement.
According to the changelog, the checks for critical temperatures are now more consistent, unaligned access in AF transaction pending test has been fixed, SS has been reenabled on Cayman, support has been added for the Corsair USB dongle, the permissions for temp2_input (amc6821) have been fixed, an ID for Telewell TW-LTE 4G v2 has been added, a memleak in caam_jr module has been corrected, and setting VID is now working properly (intel_pstate).
Also, the sleeping function can no longer be called from an invalid context, the write support on inX_input attributes has been dropped, a race condition in the wake up code for sync_io has been fixed, a bug in the channel callback dispatch code has been fixed, and support has been implemented for the Infineon Triboard.
If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.15.x branch, you should consider an update to this build. It's also a good idea to try the new 3.16 RC kernel, although it hasn't been deemed stable yet and will be in development for a while.
Linux Kernel 3.15 will most likely get quite a few updates before it gets retired, although Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer, hasn't said whether this will become an LTS release or he will retire this version quickly.
A complete list of commits in this branch of the kernel can be found in the official announcement. You can download Linux kernel 3.15.6 right now from Softpedia.