14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the fourth RC (Release Candidate) development milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel series.
According to Mr. Torvalds, who deliberately released the new Release Candidate version a day earlier than expected (again), the Linux kernel 4.9 RC4 release appeared to have already been big enough, which is due to the fact that there are a bunch of updated drivers, lots of networking fixes, as well as improvements for filesystems that triggered the bug in the new virtually mapped stacks.
"So I'm not going to lie: this is not a small RC, and I'd have been happier if it was. But it's not unreasonably large for this (big) release either, so it's not like I'd start worrying," said Linus Torvalds. "I'm currently still assuming that we'll end up with the usual seven Release Candidates, assuming things start calming down. We'll see how that goes as we get closer to a release."
Architecture, media, and GPU updates
The fourth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel series, which could be the next LTS (Long Term Support) branch, also includes various media and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) updates, architecture updates for x86, SPARC, MIPS, and PA-RISC, along with minor core networking and core kernel changes. There are probably many other small fixes, so check out the appended shortlog for details.
Linux kernel 4.9 RC4 comes exactly one week after the release of the third RC build, which was also announced on a Saturday evening, but only because Linus Torvalds was attending the Linux Kernel Summit 2016 event. The source archive is available for download right now from the kernel.org website or directly from our portal if you want to take if for a spin, just don't replace your stable kernel with it.