On September 17th 2015, the PHP group published the third release candidate of the upcoming new major branch, PHP 7 :

PHP 7.0.0 RC 3 contains fixes for 19 reported bugs and over 100 commits with various improvements.

This release provides a noticeable new Opcache feature which makes possible to move PHP code pages into the huge memory pages. It can be enabled with opcache.huge_code_pages=1 in php.ini and can bring about 2% performance gain on supported platforms. Please help us to test this feature by enabling it and providing feedback.


Packages of PHP 7.0-RC3 are now available for Debian 8 “Jessie” on amd64 and i386 architectures.

Disclaimer : THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW (from a PHP upstream and from a Dotdeb/Debian packaging perspectives) - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!

  • Don’t upgrade any staging/production/critical environments yet, and use these RC packages at your own risk!
  • Make sure that you understand the PHP/Debian/ Dotdeb changes and that you don’t need any of the missing features/packages
  • Your feedbacks are always welcome. Just make sure they are useful.

These packages have been published on the main repository for Jessie. So to test PHP 7.0-RC3 , just follow the instructions.

And as usual, feel free to show your support