14 DAY TRIAL // Yes, it's Sunday, and yes, Linus Torvalds has just announced the availability of a new RC (Release Candidate) development milestone towards the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel series.
According to Linus Torvalds, the third Release Candidate build of Linux kernel 4.8 consists of approximately 60% updated drivers for things like USB, GPU, networking, and EDAC, core networking improvements, various improvements to the XFS file systems, minor Arch updates, and other small documentation and scheduler fixes.
"After last weeks somewhat unusual patch statistics (only 1/6th drivers), we're not back to the normal programming with rc3, and we have the usual situation with roughly ~60% of the patch being driver updates. It's spread out, but most of it tends to be networking, GPU, USB and a new EDAC driver," says Linus Torvalds in today's announcement. "But all of it is fairly small."
Linux kernel 4.8 to arrive at the end of September 2016
By the looks of it, Linux 4.8 should launch as the new stable kernel branch later next month or in the first week of October 2016 is it turns out to be a big release with eight RC builds instead of the usual seven that a normal kernel series receives during its development cycle.
The fourth Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate milestone should be available to public testers next week, on August 28, the fifth one will arrive on September 4, the sixth on September 11, and the seventh on September 18. Therefore, the final Linux 4.8 kernel release should land on September 25, 2016.
In the meantime, you can help the kernel developers find bugs so that they can be fixed before the final Linux 4.8 kernel branch sees the light of day, by downloading the sources of Linux kernel 4.8 RC3 right now via our website or directly from kernel.org. Please don't replace your stable kernel with this pre-release version!