And so it beings! The development cycle of the next major version of the great Linux kernel, the core component of each and every GNU/Linux operating system, kicked off on September 12, 2015, with the first RC (Release Candidate) build.
Linus Torvalds made the announcement of Linux 4.3-rc1 a day earlier from the usual Sunday evening announcements, and he released the Linux kernel 4.3 RC1 sources to testers worldwide (see download links at the end of the article). According to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.3 is not a small release, but not that big either, especially when compared with Linux kernel 4.2, which appears to be the biggest kernel release ever.
With this occasion, Linus Torvalds also announced that the merge window for Linux kernel 4.3 is now officially closed. In numbers, the first Release Candidate version of Linux kernel 4.3 consists of 70% updated drivers, 10% architecture improvements, and the rest of 20% is filesystems enhancements, networking fixes, documentation changes, as well as “core” and mm updates.
“So it’s been fairly quiet today (which is normal: there tends to be a small rush of stuff on the last Friday of the merge window is closing, but weekends tend to calm down), and I decided that I’m not interested in catering to anything that comes in tomorrow, and I might as well just close the merge window and do the -rc1 release,” says Linus Torvalds.
Here’s what’s new in Linux kernel 4.3
Among the big changes implemented until now in Linux kernel 4.3, we can mention updates to the Nouveau video driver, lots of ARM architecture updates, various improvements to the x86, ARM64, PowerPC (PPC), MIPS, and s390 architectures, the removal of the EXT3 file system (EXT3 layouts will be handled by the EXT4 file system), and numerous updates to wireless and wired networking drivers, and to the several Btrfs, XFS, UFS, NFS, GFS2, and F2FS filesystems.
Those of you who want to test the first RC build of the Linux 4.3 kernel, can download the Linux kernel 4.3 Release Candidate 1 sources right now from either the kernel.org website or via Softpedia and start compiling. However, we remind you that this is a pre-release version, which means that it is not recommended for deployment on production systems where stability is of the essence.
Via Softpedia