Easter Yields The Linux 3.15-rc2 Kernel Release

Linus Torvalds just tagged the 3.15-rc2 kernel a few minutes ago in Git.

The second test release of the Linux 3.15 kernel is out precisely one week after the big 3.15-rc1 release; Linus has been making a good habit of accurately releasing kernel updates on Sunday.

There's many new features to the Linux 3.15 kernel with some of my favorite features being AMD VCE 2.0 video encoding support, EFI mixed mode support, file-system improvements, continued power management / ACPI work, virtualization improvements, near-complete support for building the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang, and many other additions and new hardware driver support.

Merged in the past week was just all of the early fallout fixes to the Linux 3.15 kernel additions. Notable to 3.15-rc2 for Phoronix readers is the DRM graphics driver fixes that were merged but more fixes are still forthcoming. There's also been regression/bug-fixes for the common Linux file-systems and other key parts of the Linux kernel... It seems that most of the initial fallout from the Linux 3.15 changes are starting to settle and as a result in the days ahead I'll begin with my Linux 3.15 graphics benchmarks of the Radeon / Intel / Nouveau drivers, file-system benchmarks of EXT4 / Btrfs / XFS / F2FS, and other Linux kernel performance benchmarks.

Testing of early Linux kernel RCs isn't always encouraged for new/beginner Linux users... It's also not safe to touch everything at Chernobyl, per the Phoronix tour of Chernobyl from 2010 -- for newer Phoronix readers looking for light reading/viewing material this Easter weekend.

I did already deliver a few early Linux 3.15 benchmarks while the bulk are still to be done once the Linux 3.15 kernel change rate has slowed down. In particular, early Linux 3.15 testing of Radeon DRM has been particularly volatile. Have other kernel benchmark requests for us or of Linux hardware in general? Let us know via the various social networks (links are to the left of the page).

The Linux 3.15-rc2 kernel can be fetched from the Linux Git code. Ubuntu users can easily test out this in-development kernel over the next few weeks via the Ubuntu mainline kernel PPA.