14 DAY TRIAL // Back in March, when the Alpha version of the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system was about to be seeded to public testers and early adopters, Fedora kernel maintainer Justin Forbes announced the plans for Fedora 24's default kernel.
So, knowing that, it's a little funny to read the respective announcement now as, at that point in time, the Fedora devs thought that the Linux 4.6 kernel would be released just before the final freeze of Fedora 24. Thus, they decided to go with the Linux kernel 4.5 series for the entire development cycle of the OS and seed Linux kernel 4.6 as an update to users after the official release.
Well, things have changed a little since March, and Fedora 24 Linux has received a total of three delays until now, and the final freeze stage has been moved to the end of May, on the 31st. But Linux kernel 4.6 is now out, and there's still a small window of time to rebase the upcoming operating system on the new kernel branch, which is currently tagged as mainline, not stable.
Fedora 24 ships June 14, 2016
And because of that, it looks like Linux kernel 4.6 will not be the default for the Fedora 24 operating system, which will ship in less than a month, on June 14, 2016, with the latest maintenance release of the Linux 4.5 kernel series. However, the chances are that Linux kernel 4.6 will be shortly released to the stable channels for users to upgrade their current kernel after Fedora 24's official release.
Linux kernel 4.6 was announced by Linus Torvalds on May 15, 2016. It promises to offer users a new distributed file system, OrangeFS, support for the USB 3.1 SuperSpeed Plus (SSP) protocol, Out Of Memory task killer reliability improvements, support for Intel Memory protection keys, the Kernel Connection Multiplexor, as well as 802.1AE MAC-level encryption (MACsec) support.
Moreover, Linux kernel 4.6 ships with support for the BATMAN V protocol, an online inode checker for the OCFS2 file system, dma-buf, support for cgroup namespaces, and support for the pNFS SCSI layout. The first GNU/Linux distributions to adopt the Linux 4.6 kernel branch are Gentoo, Arch Linux, and SparkyLinux, and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed should join them in the coming weeks.