Linux 3.16-rc7 Calms Things Down For The Linux 3.16 Kernel
Last week Linus Torvalds was a bit unhappy about the size of 3.16-rc6 but this week he's happy things are calming down as they should for the end of this kernel's development cycle. Linus noted, "I'm happy to say that things have calmed down a bit, and things look to be on track. Which didn't actually seem to be the case at all earlier this week - we had what appeared to be really nasty core bugs, and together with rc6 being bigger than previous rc's, I was really not feeling all that good about this release there for a while. But the worst 'nasty bugs' ended up clearing up and not being kernel bugs at all. One turned out to be a compiler issue (which is always very scary and hard to debug and very annoying), and it even had a fairly simple workaround so that we didn't end up having to blacklist compilers. Another turned out to be lockdep just being too aggressive, and a false positive." The compiler bug noted is why Linus Torvalds got frustrated by GCC 4.9.
Linus went on to say that it's possible Linux 3.16-rc7 could be the final release candidate before releasing Linux 3.16, which would then happen in about one weeks time. If bad things come about in the next week, there could still be a Linux 3.16-rc8 to push back the 3.16 debut by an additional week. Linux 3.16-rc7 though just contains the usual assortment of fixes for this stage of the kernel cycle.
If you're not already familiar with Linux 3.16, read about the many great kernel features.
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