Linux 3.7-rc7 Kernel Is "Slightly Scarier"

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.7-rc7 kernel on Sunday night and considers this new release candidate to be "slightly scarier" than the previous 3.7-rc6 release.

Last week Linus was looking at the end of the Linux 3.7 kernel development and possibly doing a quick 3.7-rc7 before declaring it gold. He released the 3.7-rc7 kernel, but it wound up with much more changes than he would like.

A week ago, I had even considered skipping -rc7 entirely as things had been so calm, but decided that there was little reason to hurry the release.

And oh, how sadly right I was. -rc7 is out now, and is not at all smaller than the previous rc's, and in fact slightly scarier. For some reason the block layer came up on the radar, and there are md, scsi and generic block layer changes in there. So we definitely want another week of testing, and hopefully things really are solid.

There's also a few filesystem fixes (reiserfs, xfs and ext3) and various other driver updates (sound, networking and drm).

Features of the Linux 3.7 kernel are covered in this article. The 3.7-rc7 short-log can be found here.