Embedded developers working on kernels or bare-metal programs often go through several development cycles. Each time the developer modifies the code, the code has to be compiled, the ELF (Executable and Linkable Format)/kernel image has to be copied onto the SD card, and the card then has to be transferred from the PC to the development board and rebooted.

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News 3.13-rc2 has been released on November 29th. This release candidate includes several small bug fixes. Please read the 3.13-rc2 release announcement.

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News Linus Torvalds released 3.12 on November 3 2013 after seven 3.12 rc cycles. This time around, instead of opening the merge window right after the release, Linus chose to delay it by a week. The 3.13 merge window will be open on November 10th. In this release announcement, Linus started a discussion on bug-fix only 4.0 idea.

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, but Linux founder and “keeper of the flame”, Linus Torvalds, has put developers and the rest of the world on notice that a Linux 4.0 is coming sooner rather than later, “I don't want us to get to the kinds of crazy numbers we had in the 2.x series, so at some point we're going to cut over from 3.x to 4.x, just to keep the numbers small and easy to

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News Linus Torvalds closed the 3.12 merge window when he released 3.12-rc1. tty layer and scalability improvements received a special mention in the release announcement. The tty layer cleanups lead to per-tty locking which will result in better performance on some work-loads.

Linus Torvalds released 3.11. Prior to 3.11 release, Linus's 3.11-rc7 announcement was posted to his Google Plus page on Linux's 22nd birthday. Here is what he had to say in his nostalgic and reminiscent statement of the passing of time in which so much has been accomplished. "Hello everybody out there using Linux -

The Linux kernel community is busy integrating and testing 3.11 content, working on 3.12 development, and finalizing the topic agenda for the upcoming Linux Conference Europe and Kernel Summit that are scheduled to be held in Edinburgh, UK from October 21-23 2013. Let's start with the release news.

As always the Linux kernel community has been busy moving the Linux mainline to another finish line and the stable and extended releases to the next bump in their revisions to fix security and bug fixes. It is a steady and methodical evolution process which is intriguing to follow. Here is my take on the happenings in the Linux kernel world during June 2013.

One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about it, Linux is probably the only OS that has a unified code base.