14 DAY TRIAL // It's Sunday night, so Linus Torvalds has announced the release of a new RC build for the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel series, which has been dubbed Charred Weasel.
According to Linus Torvalds, things continue to remain fairly calm in the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.6, which might very well get one more Release Candidate (RC), version RC7, next week, on May 8, 2016. Then, one week later, on May 15, we should be able to get our hands on the final release of Linux kernel 4.6, which will hit the stable repositories of various distributions most probably around June 2016.
"Things continue to be fairly calm, although I'm pretty sure I'll still do an rc7 in this series," says Linus Torvalds. "There's nothing particularly scary in here - there's a fix for a long-standing InfiniBand interface problem, but since you actually have to have the hardware for that, it's not like that is going to affect all that many people, and the workaround was pretty straightforward."
What's new in Linux kernel 4.6 RC6
The sixth Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel is here to add a fix for an old issue with the InfiniBand interface, which shouldn't have affected too many people. It's also supposed to update multiple drivers, in particular for things like GPU, networking (mostly Ethernet), and sound, improve the networking stack, as well as add various changes to the x86, ARM, and s390 hardware architectures.
That being said, if you can't wait until mid-May to get your hands on the final release of Linux kernel 4.6, you can download the RC6 build right now via Softpedia or the kernel.org website and start testing it. As usual, please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, which means that you shouldn't replace your OS' stable kernel packages with it.