14 DAY TRIAL // It's still Sunday in the U.S., so Linus Torvalds just published his weekly announcement to unleash yet another Release Candidate (RC) development snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel series.
According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate 6 is here to add a week's work of solid patches, updated drivers, and improvements to the supported hardware architectures and file systems, but also to update the core networking and sound stacks, as well as add many other small mm and core kernel changes. Of course, many of the issues reported by users since the previous RC release have been fixed as well.
"Things calmed down, and look very normal. About two thirds driver updates, with half of the remainder being misc architecture updates, and the rest being random stuff (some fs/crypto fixes etc)," says Linus Torvalds in today's release announcement. "I still haven't decided whether we're going to do an rc8, but I guess I don't have to decide yet. Nothing looks particularly bad, and it will depend on how rc7 looks."
Linux kernel 4.8 to launch on September 25, 2016
The development cycle of Linux kernel 4.8 will continue with one more Release Candidate (RC) build, namely RC7, which should be out next Sunday, on September 18. After that, if things go according to plan, the final release of the Linux 4.8 kernel series should hit the streets on September 25, 2016.
Until then, you can now download the Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate 6 source archive from kernel.org or via our website, compile it for your hardware architecture and take it for a test drive if you want to report bugs. Please try not to replace your stable kernel with this development/unstable version on a production system.