14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few minutes ago, June 5, 2016, Linus Torvalds announced the general availability of the second Release Candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel.
Linux kernel 4.7, as you might well be aware, is now in development, as announced by Linus Torvalds last Sunday, on May 29, 2016. It will get around seven or eight RC (Release Candidate) milestones every other Sunday until it hits stable, which should happen sometime in the second or third week of July.
However, there's a lot of work to be done until then, and Linux kernel 4.7 RC2, which Linus Torvalds says looks fairly normal, arrives today with a bunch of fixes and improvements to most of its components. Thus, worth mentioning are updated drivers and architecture changes, then improvements to various filesystems, an updated networking stack, as well as the usual core kernel and mm fixes.
It looks like some things remain unresolved in this second Release Candidate version of the Linux 4.7 kernel, such as a regression with the NFS filesystem, which will be fixed in next week's RC. "There's still a known nfs regression pending, but nobody outside of some explicit stress-testing seems to have noticed, so I made a rc2 release despite knowing of the problem," says Mr. Torvalds.
Linux kernel 4.7 RC2 now ready for public testing
The second Release Candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel is now ready for public testing, so if you are one of those hardcore geeks who want to test the latest development (read: unstable) version of the Linux kernel, go ahead and download the Linux kernel 4.7 RC2 sources via Softpedia or from the kernel.org website.
Again, don't forget that this is a pre-release version, which means that you should not install it over the stable Linux kernel packages of your GNU/Linux operating system. That being said, please come back next Sunday to get your hands on the third Release Candidate of the Linux 4.7 kernel, but until then, happy testing!