14 DAY TRIAL // Today, September 4, 2016, Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the fifth RC (Release Candidate) development milestone of the forthcoming Linux 4.8 kernel branch.
Yes, that's right, it's Sunday, and tomorrow is Labor Day in the US, so it's time to get your computer ready for some long testing sessions of the next major Linux kernel release, namely Linux 4.8, which has just received a new Release Candidate version that looks quite big compared to the previous RC.
According to Linus Torvalds, who has hoped to see things starting to calm down in the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.8, the fifth RC introduces some improvements to the Mellanox MLX5 network driver, various changes to the OverlayFS and NFS filesystems, and some other minor improvements here and there.
"So RC5 is noticeably bigger than rc4 was, and my hope last week that we were starting to calm down and shrink the releases seems to have been premature," says Linus Torvalds in today's announcement. "That said, most of the diffstat looks fairly flat (which tends to imply lots of small trivial changes rather than big invasive ones)."
Linux kernel 4.8 could be released on October 2, 2016
If things are not calming down for the Linux 4.8 kernel series, and the next Release Candidate milestone turns out to be bigger than this one, then there might be an eighth RC released after all, which means that the final Linux 4.8 kernel will land on October 2, 2016, and not September 25 as initially hoped.
That being said, you can now go and download the sources of Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate 5 right now via our website or from the kernel.org and take it for a test drive. However, we remind you once again that this is a pre-release version, and you should not replace your stable kernel with it.