Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.16-rc7 after a rather heavy and bigger Linux 3.16-rc6 noting “I’m happy to say that things have calmed down a bit, and things look to be on track.”
Torvalds highlighted that some of the ‘nasty bugs’ have been resolved and these were not kernel bugs at all. Torvalds attributed one of these bugs to the gcc-4.9.0 compiler and got it resolved with a fairly simple workaround, while the second one just turned out to be a false positive.
Linux 3.16-rc7 is ‘noticeable smaller’ as compared to previous release candidates notes Torvalds “so unlike my early worries, this might well be the last rc, we’ll see how next week looks/feels.”
Read Also: Linus Torvalds: “GCC 4.9.0 seems to be terminally broken”
This means that if things go pear shaped we may see an rc8 and the final release may be pushed back by an additional week.
Earlier Tovalds proclaimed GCC as ‘pure and utter sh*t’ and ‘terminally broken’ after a random panic was discovered in a load balance function in Linux 3.16-rc6 and it wasn’t because of a kernel bug, but it resulted because of the way the compiler compiled the kernel code. GCC 4.9.0 apparently spilled a constant and an incorrect stack red-zoning on x86-64 code generation.
