Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability of the forth release candidate in the 3.9 branch of the Linux kernel.
It’s Monday and this means that Linus Torvalds has released a new Linux kernel over the weekend, probably at an impossible hour.
The Linux developer and maintainer has expressed his disappointment because the commits haven’t calmed down, and in fact, the pace of development for this this particular branch, seems to have increased.
“Another week, another -rc. And things haven’t calmed down, meaning that the nice small and calm -rc2 was definitely the outlier so far. But I’m optimistic, dammit, and I’m going to keep hoping that things will change, and the upcoming week will be boring and devoid of any real work what-so-ever. It had better be, because it’s spring break and the kids are around,” stated Torvalds in the official announcement.
Linus Torvalds also said that the new release candidate didn’t hold anything special, besides the usual drivers, updates, and filesystem fixes.
Highlights of Linux kernel 3.9 RC4:
• Specialized is now avoided in TLA’s in ZPODD’s Kconfig;
• A regression which occurred during gadget driver unbinding has been fixed;
• SPARC64-X chips are now correctly recognized;
• A missed lock has been added in vhost_scsi_clear_endpoint();
• Only use TX push if a single descriptor has to be written;
• The cputable entry has been fixed for 970MP rev 1.0;
• The Device IDs has been added for Intel Wellsburg PCH;
• Stop using GMBUS IRQs on Gen4 chips;
• Support has been added for atheros 04ca:3004 device to ath3k;
• An entry has been for the NVMe driver.
More details about the updates and the new features in the kernel can be found in the official announcement.