Linux 4.13-rc2 is now ready for public testing

Jul 24, 2017 01:30 GMT  ·  By

The development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel series, whose release cycle was kicked off last week by none other than Linus Torvalds, continues today with the second Release Candidate (RC) milestone.

According to Linus Torvalds, this second Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.13 is bigger than average, as the Linux creator would have expected to see things starting off a little slow at this stage of development, which could suggest the Linux 4.13 kernel cycle getting eight RCs instead of the usual seven that a normal release gets. But, after all, it's too early to make any predictions.

"Normally RC2 is really small because people are taking a breather and haven't started finding bugs yet, but this time around we have a bigger-than-average RC2," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "We'll just have to see how that translates to the rest of the release cycle, but I suspect it's just the normal variability in this thing."

Linux 4.13 RC2 changelog dominated by the new vboxvideo staging driver

As for the things implemented in this second Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel, we can mention that the appended shortlog is dominated by the new vboxvideo staging driver, which appears to have been implemented by famous kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. Other than that, you'll also find updated networking, USB, SCSI, and RDMA drivers.

The rest of the patch is a mix of architecture updates for x86, PowerPC (PPC), and SPARC, various improvements for the NFS and OverlayFS filesystems, some new “Berkeley Packet Filter” (BPF) test code, and the usual networking stack and core kernel changes. You can download the Linux kernel 4.13 RC2 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to take it for a test drive.

We have to warn you though that this is an unstable build, so make sure you don't replace your stable kernel with it, nor deploy it on production machines. From the looks of it, Linux kernel 4.13 is expected to launch in early or mid-September, depending on if it will receive seven or eight Release Candidates. Linux kernel 4.13 won't be a long-term supported (LTS) branch.