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'Charred Weasel' Linux

Linus Torvalds has honoured the LHC-frying weasel that died last week.

The Linux lord paid his respects by naming this week's version of Linux, 4.6 rc6, "Charred Weasel" in this Git commit.

Torvalds rates this week's effort, rc6 of Linux 4.6, as offering "nothing particularly scary". The only change he bothers to note in prose is an infiniband fix.

The bulk of the rest is really just the normal random noise, he writes. “Drivers (sound, gpu, ethernet being the bulk of it), architectures (arm, s390, x86), networking is the bulk of it.”

Torvalds also writes that we can expect another release candidate next week, bringing us to the usual seven release candidates between point releases of the Linux kernel.

Linux kernel version numbers are essentially meaningless: Torvalds only rolled over from 3.19 to 4.0 after deciding it was just time to do so because version numbers beyond x.20 get a bit untidy.

Torvalds had previously floated the idea that the 4.0 release could be a special edition devoted to nothing but big fixes, but that idea did not generate much enthusiasm in the Linux kernel development community. ®

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