October 2017
Intermediate to advanced
586 pages
14h 8m
English
Content preview from Linux Device Drivers Development
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Getting the sources
In the early kernel days (until 2003), odd-even versioning styles were used, where odd numbers were stable and even numbers were unstable. When the 2.6 version was released, the versioning scheme switched to X.Y.Z, where:
- X: This was the actual kernel version, also called major; it incremented when there were backwards-incompatible API changes
- Y: This was the minor revision; it incremented after adding a functionality in a backwards-compatible manner
- Z: This was also called PATCH, representing the version relative to bug fixes
This is called semantic versioning, and it was used until the 2.6.39 version; when Linus Torvalds decided to bump the version to 3.0, which also meant the end of semantic versioning in 2011, and ...