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Two weeks have passed since the release the Linux 5.13 kernel series and now the merge window for Linux kernel 5.14 is closed as Linus Torvalds just announced today the availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone.
While most GNU/Linux distributions are still struggling to upgrade their kernels to Linux 5.13, which already got its first point release and it’s marked as “stable” on the kernel.org website, the kernel developers are busy again with the next major release, Linux kernel 5.14.
The first Release Candidate (RC) is now ready for public testing, as announced by Linus Torvalds, who says that it includes about 13k commits from approximately 1650 developers. Once again, there are big changes for AMD GPU hardware, and all IDE support is now based on libata.
“On the whole, I don’t think there are any huge surprises in here, and size-wise this seems to be a pretty regular release too,” said Torvalds. “Let’s hope that that translates to a nice and calm release cycle, but you never know.”
Like with all previous kernel releases, Linux 5.14 will come with new and updated drivers to support more hardware devices, improved filesystems, architectures, networking, scheduling, VM, and last but not least documentation and tooling updates. Check out Linus Torvalds’ mergelog here for all the technical details on that.
The final release of Linux kernel 5.14 should arrive at the end of August, on the 29th, or in early September, on the 5th. As usual, this will depend on how many Release Candidates will be published during the entire development cycle.
Until then, if you want to help the kernel developers with the testing of Linux kernel 5.14, go ahead and download the first Release Candidate from the kernel.org website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, which means that it’s NOT suitable for use on a production machine.
Last updated 3 years ago
