The Linux Foundation has announced the release of Linux 4.0. Much has been made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but that was not the only reason for the version number change, said Linux creator Linus Torvalds in his release notes. “We've had much bigger changes in other versions," Torvalds added. "So this is very much a ‘solid code progress’ release.”
According to The Linux Foundation’s Libby Clark, who added perspective to the 4.0 release in a recent blog, “The most significant new addition is the foundation code for live kernel patching, which allows critical bugs to be fixed on production servers without rebooting the kernel. When the feature integration is complete in future kernel versions, it will represent years of collaboration between SUSE and Red Hat to merge the code from their respective live-patching projects, kGraft and Kpatch, into the upstream kernel.”
In addition, the release is “a milestone for the project in a few unintentional ways,” said Clark, who went on to detail some of the “numerology” associated with the new release.
“First, rather than rollover the kernel version from the previous release, 3.19 to 3.20, Torvalds in February polled the community and determined that a slim majority favored pushing the new version to 4.0,” wrote Clark, who noted that this is the same poll that resulted in the 4.0 release code name, ‘Hurr Durr I'm a Sheep.’”
Clark also said that, looking at the git commits, Torvalds found that the project surpassed 500,000 commits for the first time in this new version