Linux 3.19-rc1 Kernel Released Ahead Of Schedule

The first release candidate to the Linux 3.19 kernel was released on Saturday.

As written about earlier on Phoronix, Linus Torvalds decided to close the Linux 3.19 merge window ahead of schedule -- just shy of the 14 days that usually takes place for each Linux kernel merge window.

Linus wrote in the 3.19-rc1 announcement, "Considering how much came in fairly late, I find it hard to care about anybody who had decided to cut it even closer than some people already did. That said, maybe there aren't any real stragglers - and judging by the size of rc1, there really can't have been much. Not only do I think there are more commits than there were in linux-next, this is one of the bigger rc1's (at least by commits) historically. We've had bigger ones (3.10 and 3.15 both had large merge windows leading up to them), but this was definitely not a small merge window."

Linux 3.19 is overall another big update in line with earlier releases, "In the 'big picture', this looks like a fairly normal release. About two thirds driver updates, with about half of the rest being architecture updates (and no, the new nios2 patches are not at all dominant, it's about half ARM, with the new nios2 support being less than 10% of the arch updates by lines overall). The remaining one sixth is "misc": networking, header updates, documentation, filesystems, tooling, and core kernel (in pretty much that order)."

For 3.19-rc1 at least, the kernel remains codenamed the Diseased Newt. I've written dozens of articles on Phoronix in recent weeks about Linux 3.19 and on Sunday I should have the time to write my usual feature overview about the most interesting changes I find about this latest cycle; to support Phoronix please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip.