14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has announced that the first Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.16 branch has arrived, marking the beginning of a new development cycle.
The Linux kernel development never stops, and only a week after the release of the final version in the 3.15 branch a new one is now available. As you can imagine, this is not something for regular users.
Linux kernel 3.16 had a very interesting start. For the first time, Linus Torvalds opened the merge window for the new kernel before releasing the final version in the previous one. He did this out of necessity, but if things go well we might get to see this kind of thing happening a lot more often.
“It may have been a slightly unusual two week merge window, in that it's only one week since the release of 3.15 and the first week overlapped with the last -rc for that previous release, but that doesn't seem to have affected development much. Things look normal, and if anything, this is one of the bigger release windows rather than on the smaller side. It's not quite as big as the merge window for 3.15, but it's actually not that far off.”
“Outside of drivers and architecture updates, there's the usual mixture of changes elsewhere: filesystems (mainly reiserfs, xfs, btrfs, nfs), networking, ‘core’ kernel (mm, locking, scheduler, tracing), and tooling (perf and power, also new self-tests),” noted Linus Torvalds in this regular email update.
As usual, the bulk of the Linux kernel 3.16 RC1 is mostly made up of drivers, but there are some other changes and improvements as well. This particular version of the kernel is already shaping up to be quite interesting. NVIDIA, for example, made some important contributions in order to ensure that the Nouveau driver (open source version) will work properly. The Synaptics driver has also been improved, along with the driver for Dell Latitude, various KVM changes have been implemented, and more.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official changelog. You can download Linux kernel 3.16 RC1 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.
You need to keep in mind that this version of the Linux kernel is not for regular users. You might be able to compile it for your system, but it's likely that things will go wrong. If you really want to test it, don't do it on your own computer, use a dummy.