14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds has just announced that Linux kernel 4.3 RC4 has been released, taking this kernel branch a little bit closer to a final release.
We were expecting to see some kind of mention from Linus Torvalds about the 24th birthday of the Linux kernel that will be celebrated tomorrow, but it looks like he's not going to make a big deal out of it. In fact, he did mention the date of the announcement, which is the second celebration of the kernel, but that was back in August. Linus doesn't seem like the type of guy who likes the kind of attention a celebration brings, and he would most likely enjoy releasing a new RC for 4.3 more.
The things have been calming down with Linux kernel 4.3, and it doesn't seem that anything out of the ordinary has happened this week. This is actually a good thing, as most developers prefer the calmness. Excitement usually means that things are unstable, and that's not something desirable.
What's new in Linux kernel 4.3 RC4
Even if these kinds of updates seem a little bit boring by themselves, when you put all of them together, you get something awesome. A regular Linux kernel development cycle usually lasts about eight weeks or eight RCs, so we're almost halfway through.
"You all know the drill by now. It's Sunday, and there is a new release candidate out there. Things look fairly normal. We have noticeably fewer commits than rc3 (which was fairly big), and I don't see anything unusually alarming. The statistics look pretty normal too: just under half of the patch is drivers (drm continues to be noticeable, but there's infiniband, mmc, input layer, etc.). About a quarter is Arch updates (m68k, MIPS, x86) and the final quarter is solidly 'misc' (doc updates, tools, scripts, scheduler, mm..)," wrote Linus Torvalds in his regular announcement.
As usual, you can download Linux kernel 4.3 RC4 from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that this is the source, and it has to be compiled. Don't use it on a production machine.