14 DAY TRIAL // As usual, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday evening announcement to introduce us to a new Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel, the second in the series.
Yes, you're reading it right, Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 2 is now ready for download and testing, and according to Linus Torvalds, it appears to be full of bug fixes, updated drivers, cleanups, and various other changes. Those that stand out in this release are the improvements implemented for the Intel i915 driver and PowerPC architecture.
"As usual, the week after rc1 tends to be fairly quiet when people are still looking for bugs and taking a breather after the merge window," said Linus Torvalds. "But we've got a healthy number of fixes in, and there's some cleanup/prep patches for the upcoming 5-level page table support that I took after the merge window just to make the next merge window easier."
mm patches, radix tree test updates, and improved filesystems
The second Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel also introduces various improvements to a bunch of filesystems, updates the radix tree test, and adds some new mm patches. If you're interested in the technical details, we recommend studying the appended shortlog in the mailing list announcement. To test this release, go ahead and download the source tarball from kernel.org or via our website.
When testing an RC release of the Linux kernel, please try to keep in mind that it's a development build which contains unresolved issues. Therefore, we do not recommend installing it on a stable, production-ready environment. However, Linus Torvalds encourages brave Linux users to test this release and report bugs or at least inform the kernel developers that things are working well on they machines.