It was that 3.0 version change which woke people up from the Linux 2.x problem, where scripts assumed Linux versions began with a 2 and, lets be honest, it wasn’t really a problem. If you have scripts which are assuming 3.x version numbers on your Linux builds, find the person who wrote them and sit them down for a “conversation” because there’s no way that that kind of assumption is excusable after only four years. For 2.x, there was fifteen years of heritage, not so for 3.0.
Don’t read too much into the use of a poll to pick the new version number.
... after extensive statistical analysis of my G+ polling, I've come to the inescapable conclusion that internet polls are bad.
What’s in 4.0 RC1? It’s yet another incremental update of Linux. In his LKML posting, Linus points out his favourite features are " actually some vm cleanups, where this release is getting rid of the largely unused non-linear remapping code (replaced with just emulating it with lots of smaller mappings) and unifies the NUMA and PROTNONE handling for page tables". For others, the live patching system thats being introduced may allow future kernel problems to be fixed without a reboot; here’s the commit.
Apart from that, a small typical update which would have passed relatively un-noticed if it had been a 3.20. So, it’s Linux 4.0 RC1 and that’s Numberwang!
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog