The first major Linux kernel version number change since 2003 is now available, but it’s not as big a change as the number change might imply.
The Linux 2.6 kernel was first released in December of 2003 and has since been followed by 39 major releases, the last being the 2.6.39 kernel that came out in May. Linux founder Linus Torvalds decided that going to 2.6.40 was too big a number and instead pushed the version number to 3.0.
“There are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it’s simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux,” Torvalds wrote in a mailing list posting.
Read the full story at Datamation:
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