14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds announced a few minutes ago, April 27, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel, due for release later this year.
According to Mr. Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.1 RC1 is a normal release, and the merge window looks normal too. The RC1 version of Linux kernel 4.1 comes exactly two weeks after the release of the Linux 4.0 kernel on April 12, 2015.
In numbers, almost 60 percent of the patches are for hardware drivers, 20 percent of them are for hardware architectures, and the rest of patches are networking, sound, and other components.
"No earth-shattering new features come to mind, even if initial support for ACPI on arm64 looks funny," says Linus Torvalds in the mailinglist announcement. "Depending on what you care about, your notion of "big new feature" may differ from mine, of course. There's a lot of work all over, and some of it might just make a big difference to your use cases."
Linux kernel 4.1 RC1 adds initial support for ACPI on ARM64
Unfortunately, the first Release Candidate version of Linux kernel 4.1 includes no Earth-shattering new features. Initial support for the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification on the ARM64 hardware architecture is one of the new features of Linux kernel 4.1.
As usual, those of you who want to test Release Candidate (RC) versions of the upcoming and highly anticipated Linux kernel 4.1 can download the source package for Linux kernel 4.1 RC1 right now via Softpedia or directly from the kernel.org website.
We remind everyone that Linux kernel 4.1 is in early development stage, which means that an RC (Release Candidate) version contains bugs. Thus, we do not recommend installing it on production machines unless you know what you are doing.