14 DAY TRIAL // On May 11, Linus Torvalds announced that the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.10 kernel was made available for download and testing.
Linux kernel 3.10 RC1 (Release Candidate 1) brings too many changes to count, including bugfixes, improvements and updated or new drivers. Among some of them, we can mention VFS updates, device-mapper updates, Ceph changes, VFIO updates, and ARM SoC platform updates.
Moreover, the XFS and Btrfs filesystems have been updated, as well as the PowerPC and x86 architectures. This first development release of Linux kernel 3.10 also includes KVM updates and fixes, some audit changes, ARM64 fixes, PCI & LED subsystem updates, and F2FS improvements.
Xen was also updated in Linux kernel 3.10 RC1, the S/390 architecture and the NVMe driver also received some changes, added support for OMAP3 ISP common clock framework, rwsem has been optimized and Hexagon, MIPS, SCSI and ACPICA received various improvements.
eCryptfs and watchdog have been improved in this first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.10, and the ARM platform received several improvements.
"So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) at least as far as counting commits go, even if not necessarily in actual lines (I didn't check the statistics on that). Which was unexpected, because while linux-next was fairly big, it wasn't exceptionally so."
"I'm sure Stephen Rothwell will talk about the statistics of commits that weren't in -next, we'll see if that was the reason.. Anyway, despite the large number of commits, hopefully it's all boringly straigthforward. Sure," Linus Torvalds said in the official release announcement, where you can also find the detailed changelog.
Download Linux kernel 3.10 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.