Users are invited to test drive Linux 4.10-rc5

Jan 22, 2017 22:27 GMT  ·  By

Another week, another Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel has been announced on a Sunday evening by Linus Torvalds, the fifth in the series.

Yes, you're reading it right, Linus Torvalds made his regular Sunday announcement a few minutes ago, informing the community about the immediate availability of Linux kernel 4.10 RC5, which arrives one week after the fourth Release Candidate. And it looks like things have started to calm down.

"Things seem to be calming down a bit, and everything looks nominal," said Linus Torvalds. "There's only been about 250 changes (not counting merges) in the last week, and the diffstat touches less than 300 files (with drivers and architecture updates being the bulk, but there's tooling, networking and filesystems in there too)."

Linux kernel 4.10 could land on February 12, 2017

With today's announcement, which was very brief this time, Linus Torvalds is also informing the Linux community interested in the development of the Linux kernel that Linux 4.10 might just have a regular release schedule, with a total of seven RC (Release Candidate) builds, and not eight like some other kernel releases received in the past.

This means that Linux kernel 4.10 could hit the streets on February 12, 2017, if it gets its sixth Release Candidate version next week and last one on February 5. If not, and things turn to be more complicated, the launch will be delayed for one week, until February 19, which isn't bad considering the fact that we barely enjoyed Linux 4.9.

Until then, you are invited to take today's Linux kernel 4.10 RC5 development release for a test drive. Don't forget to report any issues you might discover, and please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not to be used on a production machine. Download the Linux kernel 4.10 Release Candidate 5 source tarball right now from kernel.org.

Update: One of our readers has informed us about the fact that Linus Torvalds codenamed the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel release as "Anniversary Edition," which replaces the old "Roaring Lionus" code name used until RC4. You can view the change on Linus Torvalds' latest Git commit.