-rc are Kernel release candidates (for testing and analysis) and an approaching official release.

These are development kernels released by Linus whenever he deems the current git (the kernels source management tool) tree to be in a resonably sane state adequate for testing. These kernels are not stable (-rc kernel patches are generated from the kernel base stable release) and you should expect occasional breakage if you intend to run them. This is however the most stable of the main development branches and is also what will eventually turn into the next stable kernel, so it is important that it be tested by as many people as possible.

This is a good branch to run for people who want to help out testing development kernel but do not want to run some of the really experimental stuff (such people should see the sections about -git and -mm kernels below).

The -rc patches are not incremental, they apply to a base 2.6.x kernel, just like the 2.6.x.y patches described above. The kernel version before the -rcN suffix denotes the version of the kernel that this -rc kernel will eventually turn into. So, 2.6.13-rc5 means that this is the fifth release candidate for the 2.6.13 kernel and the patch should be applied on top of the 2.6.12 kernel source.

Examples

To create the 2.6.14-rc5 kernel, you must:

Yes, you want 2.6.13, not 2.6.14. Remember, that's an -rc kernel, as in, 2.6.14 doesn't exist yet. :)

Here are 3 other examples of how to apply these patches

# first an example of moving from 2.6.12 to 2.6.13-rc3 $ cd ~/linux-2.6.12 # change into the 2.6.12 source dir $ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.13-rc3 # apply the 2.6.13-rc3 patch $ cd .. $ mv linux-2.6.12 linux-2.6.13-rc3 # rename the source dir

# now let's move from 2.6.13-rc3 to 2.6.13-rc5 $ cd ~/linux-2.6.13-rc3 # change into the 2.6.13-rc3 dir $ patch -p1 -R < ../patch-2.6.13-rc3 # revert the 2.6.13-rc3 patch $ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.13-rc5 # apply the new 2.6.13-rc5 patch $ cd .. $ mv linux-2.6.13-rc3 linux-2.6.13-rc5 # rename the source dir

# finally let's try and move from 2.6.12.3 to 2.6.13-rc5 $ cd ~/linux-2.6.12.3 # change to the kernel source dir $ patch -p1 -R < ../patch-2.6.12.3 # revert the 2.6.12.3 patch $ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.13-rc5 # apply new 2.6.13-rc5 patch $ cd .. $ mv linux-2.6.12.3 linux-2.6.13-rc5 # rename the kernel source dir