Linux 3.14-rc4 Kernel Released, Shows Progress

[bridgman]

How many does the kernel usually see? It's already on release candidate 4 after all.

The terminology can be misleading. The rc1 milestone in the kernel corresponds to "the merge window closing", ie it's the first time all the new stuff appears.

You could call it a pre-Alpha, or the first Alpha, making it clear that a "typical" RC is some ways off, but (a) the rc* terminology is simpler, and (b) I guess it is possible (although statistically unlikely) that the result of the initial merge could be so good and so clean that Linus declares rc1 as "the final" for that cycle.

The norm these days seems to be 8-ish RCs, or 10 weeks per cycle, which causes a bit of pain for anyone (me) who did their scheduling based on a quarterly kernel cycle

[FutureSuture]

7 or 8
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/testing/

The terminology can be misleading. The rc1 milestone in the kernel corresponds to "the merge window closing", ie it's the first time all the new stuff appears.

You could call it a pre-Alpha, or the first Alpha, making it clear that a "typical" RC is some ways off, but (a) the rc* terminology is simpler, and (b) I guess it is possible (although statistically unlikely) that the result of the initial merge could be so good and so clean that Linus declares rc1 as "the final" for that cycle.

The norm these days seems to be 8-ish RCs, or 10 weeks per cycle, which causes a bit of pain for anyone (me) who did their scheduling based on a quarterly kernel cycle

Thank you for the explanations. That truly is a bit misleading, especially for n00bs like me who get their hopes up.

[AdamW]

Baytrail

FWIW, if I'm counting right, this is likely the first stock kernel for a while that will reliably boot on Baytrail systems (at least as a 32-bit kernel, I haven't tested the 64-bit-on-32-bit setup Ubuntu folks are using at all). Has a bug that'll cause very poor performance, though, and power off / reboot won't work.

Intel folks are landing Baytrail (and Haswell and Broadwell SoC) sound support at present; I think this is likely to make it into 3.14, if I grok the upstreaming process correctly.

[Rexilion]

Thank you for the explanations. That truly is a bit misleading, especially for n00bs like me who get their hopes up.

For quite some time I have only been jumping from rc to rc.

Usually rc1 is a landmine if you use drivers under development. My case that would be only nouveau. It's a great way to contribute!

rc2 usually contains quite some huge pulls as well from the late folks.

rc3 still contains many of the bugs introduced in rc1.

rc4 is quite stable to use most of the time. Rc's later than 2 are mostly comprised of small bugfixes. In the same order as a stable minor release.