14 DAY TRIAL // Today, November 13, 2016, Linus Torvalds announced the release and general availability of the fifth RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming and highly anticipated Linux 4.9 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.9 could be the next LTS (Long Term Support) branch, and it promises to be the greatest kernel release ever, bringing support for some older AMD Radeon GPUs in the AMDGPU driver, and lots of other improvements. Right now, earlier adopters can get their hands on Linux kernel 4.9 RC5, which looks like it's much smaller than RC4.
"Things have definitely gotten smaller, so a normal release schedule (with rc7 being the last one) is still looking possible despite the large size of 4.9," said Linus Torvalds in today's announcement. "But let's see how things work out over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, there's a lot of normal fixes in here, and we just need more testing [...] so go out and test."
Linux kernel 4.9 should hit the streets on the first day of December 2016
According to Linus Torvalds, things now look fairly normal for the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel series, whose changes are "extremely boring." Mr. Torvalds considers this a good thing for the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.9, which should hit the streets in its final, production-ready state sometime in the first days of December 2016, but only if it gets seven Release Candidates and not eight.
Looking at the appended shortlog, we can notice that Linux kernel 4.9 RC5 consists of two-thirds driver updates, 10% architecture fixes, 10% filesystem improvements, and the rest are various small bug fixes, but nothing stands out. Linux kernel 4.9 Release Candidate 5 also re-implements the "-Wmaybe-uninitialized" function. You can download Linux kernel 4.9 RC5 right now from kernel.org or via our website and start testing.