14 DAY TRIAL // On June 29, Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing that the third RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel was available for download and testing.
As you’ve probably noticed, the Sunday release schedule for development versions of the Linux kernel is now back, and this build introduces mostly filesystem and architecture updates. In detail, Linux kernel 3.16 RC3 boasts several architecture updates, including for x86 (32-bit), ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS, various filesystem updates, including for NFS (Network File System), OCFS2, and AIO, networking improvements, as well as a handful of mm fixes.
On the driver side of things, we can mention that the third Release Candidate of Linux kernel 3.16 comes with a small amount of driver updates, most of them being quite insignificant.
“There's perhaps relatively less driver updates than usual, with most of them being pretty small, but that is probably just a timing thing (ie Greg didn't send his USB/staging changes this week, so driver changes are mostly gpu, networking and sound).”
“As a result misc architecture updates (mips, powerpc, x86, arm) dominate the diff, and there are various random other updates. We've got filesystem updates (aio, nfs and ocfs2), a small batch of mm fixes from Andrew, some networking stuff.etc.,” Linus Torvalds stated in the official release announcement.
You can download Linux kernel 3.16 RC3 right now from Softpedia, but be aware that it is an unstable software and it is not recommended to be installed on production machines.