14 DAY TRIAL // It's Sunday evening again, and this means Linus Torvalds is announcing the availability of a new RC (Release Candidate) build of the forthcoming Linux 4.10 kernel branch, the seventh in the series.
According to Linus Torvalds, things have been very quiet since the sixth Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.10, and this RC7 build, which also appears to be the last, is a small one that brings various updated GPU, HID, and networking drivers, a bunch of improvements for the ARM64, PowerPC (PPC), SPARC, and x86 hardware architectures, as well as various other fixes to supported filesystems, virtual machine support, networking stack, and genksyms scripting.
"It's all been very quiet, and unless anything bad happens, we're all back to the regular schedule with this being the last RC," said Linus Torvalds in today's mailing list announcement. "Of course, when I actually looked at my calendar, I realized that if that actually happens, the next merge window will be awkward for me due to travel, so it turns out that I should never have hoped for things calming down in the first place. But I've done merge windows during travels before, so it's not like it would necessarily be a big problem."
Linux kernel 4.10 is launching on February 12, 2017
Therefore, we should wait for the final Linux 4.10 kernel release to land in one week from the moment of writing this article, on February 12, 2017, but it will take a few good weeks before we'll be able to use it in our favorite GNU/Linux distributions, most of which will stay true to the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series.
We believe that rolling distributions like Arch Linux and Solus will move to the Linux kernel 4.10 branch in a few weeks after its initial launch, more precisely when the first point release, Linux kernel 4.10.1, is released. Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) will also come with Linux kernel 4.10 by default this spring, on April 13, 2017.
If you want to help with the testing, you can download the Linux kernel 4.10 Release Candidate 7 tarball right now from kernel.org or via our web portal, whichever suits you best, compile it, and install it on a spare computer you keep for testing purposes. Make sure not to replace your stable kernel with this pre-release build.