Linux 4.11-rc5 is now ready for public testing

Apr 3, 2017 01:37 GMT  ·  By

It's Sunday again, at least in the US, which means that some of us we'll get to test drive a new Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel, the fifth in the series.

Announced a few moments ago by Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 5 comes one week after the previous RC version and appears to be a fairly normal patch consisting of about 60% updated drivers for PCI, EDAC, sound, block, etc., approximately 30% architecture updates, especially for PA-RISC, and the rest of 10% is split between filesystem (mostly Btrfs and NFS) improvements and core kernel and mm changes.

"The only slightly unusual thing is how over half the Arch updates are for PA-RISC, but that's just a temporary oddity from the fix to the PA-RISC user copy routines, which resulted in a fairly big patch (due to them just being written as regular assembler code rather than as a broken mess of inline assembly with some C mixed in)," said Linus Torvalds in today's announcement.

Linux kernel 4.11 could launch on April 23

Now that the development cycle of the Linux 4.11 kernel has advanced to the fifth RC, and things have finally started to calm down, at least according to Linus Torvalds, we can finally guess that the final release could launch on time, which is April 23, 2017. But that will only happen if things don't go the other way, and Linux kernel 4.11 gets the usual seven Release Candidates.

Until then, you can download the Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 5 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website and take it for a long night test drive on your hardware. Please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so make sure you don't install it on production machines, nor replace a stable kernel with it, and don't forget to report bugs through the usual channels.