14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, Linus Torvalds made his regular Sunday announcement to inform us about the availability of the fourth Release Candidate (RC) development release of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel.
Coming one week after the third Release Candidate, Linux 4.11 RC4 appears to be just a bit smaller than the previous build, updating the networking stack and many of the supported drivers to be on par with what was changed earlier this week in the stable Linux kernel branches.
"So last week, I said that I was hoping that RC3 was the point where we'd start to shrink the RCs, and yes, RC4 is smaller than RC3. By a tiny tiny smidgen," said Linus Torvalds. "It does touch a few more files, but it has a couple fewer commits, and fewer lines changed overall. But on the whole, the two are almost identical in size."
Linux kernel 4.11 might get eight RCs
Besides the usual driver updates and networking changes, the fourth Release Candidate of the Linux 4.11 kernel adds a bunch of core kernel improvements, an audit fix, a bpf hashmap fix, improvements to some of the supported hardware architectures, as well as to some of the filesystems.
Check the appended shortlog for all the technical details and don't hesitate to download Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 4 right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to take it for a test drive. Please try to keep in mind that this is an unstable kernel, so don't replace your stable kernel with this one, nor use it in production environments.
Looking at how the development cycle of the Linux 4.11 kernel advances, we should expect the final release to land at the end of April. If things don't get smaller and there are indeed eight RCs, the final release will be out on the 30th, but if things indeed get smaller with each new Release Candidate, we'll be able to enjoy its new features on the 23rd.