A new development version has been made available

Jan 19, 2015 08:55 GMT  ·  By

Linus Torvalds has released yet another update for the Linux kernel 3.19 branch and this is the fifth Release Candidate in the series. The development cycle is getting closer to its end and that can be observed from the changelog.

The Linux development cycle is never this calm, but it looks like the 3.19 branch turned out to be pretty uneventful. This seldom happens and Linus is making the best of it by providing updates pretty fast. If nothing changes in the meantime, the next iteration of the kernel could be released in the next few weeks.

Despite the fact that the devel cycle superimposed on the holidays, the stream of updates hasn't changed all that much and the developers have kept pushing changes and updates, enough for Linus to keep the ball rolling and to make RCs available for everyone to download and test.

Linux kernel 3.19 RC5 is past the half point in the cycle

There is no precise date for the launch of the next kernel and the developers are not bound by a launch window, although they do try to make the launchers as predictable as possible. That also means that they will delay a launch if something isn't right with the kernel.

"Fairly normal release, although I'd wish that by rc5 we'd have calmed down even further. But no, with some of the driver tree merges in particular, this is actually larger than rc4 was. That said, it's not like there is anything particularly scary in here. The arm64 vm bug that I mentioned as pending in the rc4 notes got fixed within a day of that previous rc release, and the rest looks pretty standard," wrote Linus Torvalds on the mailing list.

You can download the Linux kernel 3.19 RC5 from Softpedia. This is the source package and that means that you will have to compile it yourself, a task that shouldn't be attempted unless you really know what you're doing.