Torvalds Announces Linux 3.15-rc6

Linux founder, Linus Torvalds has officially announced the sixth Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.15. The RC6 is a successor to Linux 3.15-rc5. It is now available for download and testing. However, since it is a development version, it should not be installed on production machines.

"Due to travels and related lack of internet access, the rc releases haven't been following the normal Sunday release cycle, and since I caught up with what happened while I was off-line, rather than wait until next Sunday to reset to the normal cycle, I'm just releasing rc6 now mid-week from Tokyo." Torvalds said in the release note. The latest release candidate mainly concentrates on driver updates (acpi,sound, media, i915, clk, pci) with the bulk of the rest being various arch updates. "With rc5 being a couple of days early, and rc6 being several days late, we had almost two weeks in between them.

The size of the result is not twice as large, though, hopefully partially because it's getting late in the rc series and things are supposed to be calming down, but presumably also because some submaintainers just didn't send their pull requests because they knew I was off-line." Torvalds added.

The upcoming Linux 3.15 kernel that is expected to release in mid-2014 will come with a large number of ACPI and power management updates. Pointing out to a list of changes posted by Rafael Wysocki, an Intel employee who maintains the Linux kernel's core power management code, a report by Phoronix earlier quoted that "visible to users with the Linux 3.15 kernel should be reduced time for system suspend and resuming, thanks to the enabling of more asynchronous threads." Linux 3.15 might also come with basic support for Nvidia's Maxwell architecture. Further details are awaited.

Here's the complete Linux 3.15-rc6 release note.