14 DAY TRIAL // Being Sunday evening and all that, Linus Torvalds just made its regular announcement a few moments ago informing the community about the release of the fifth RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.12 RC5 does not follow in the footsteps of last week's Release Candidate 4 milestone, nor any of the other previous RCs and appears to be a slightly bigger patch that adds numerous updated drivers, especially GPU, SCSI, networking, sound, and block layer ones, various improvements for the ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), x86, SPARC and PPC (PowerPC) hardware architectures, and updates to the Btrfs, EXT4 and UFS filesystems.
"It's not like RC5 is *huge*, but it definitely isn't the nice and small one I was hoping for. There's nothing in particular that looks very worrisome, and it may well just be random timing - the RC sizes do fluctuate a lot depending on just which subsystem gets synced up that particular RC, and we may just have hit that 'everybody happened to sync up this week' case," says Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement.
Linux kernel 4.12 to launch in early July
As we stated in our previous reports, the Linux 4.12 kernel series appears to launch in early July 2017, either on the 2nd or the 9th, depending on if there will be seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) milestones released during its entire development cycle. Two other RCs are expected in the coming weeks, specifically Linux kernel 4.12 RC6 on June 18 and Linux kernel 4.12 RC7 on June 25, 2017.
Until then, we invite you to download the source tarball of Linux kernel 4.12 Release Candidate 5 right now from kernel.org or via our website, compile and install it on a testing computer, and report any bugs or issues you might encounter. Please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that you should not install on a production machine, nor replace a stable kernel with it.