14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday announcement for the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel branch, which is now available for public testing.
Linux kernel 4.8 entered development last week, when the merge window was officially closed and the first Release Candidate development milestone released to the world. According to Linus Torvalds, the second RC build is here to update more drivers, even more hardware architectures, as well as to fix issues for supported filesystems and add some extra mm work.
"But that's most likely just because the fixes to the bigger driver areas haven't started trickling in yet - RC2 tends to be a quiet period after the craziness that is the merge window," says Linus Torvalds in the announcement. "And the reason mm/ stands out is mainly just because of a pull request from the merge window that I had delayed until after rc1 in order to look more at it."
Users are invited to download Linux 4.8-rc2, test it, and report bugs
Linus Torvalds invites everyone to go out and test the second Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel series, which should be ready for use in production environments sometime at the end of September or the second day of October, depending on whether it will get the usual seven RC development milestones or eight in case some problems occur during its development cycle.
If you're not shy, and you want to test and report bugs, we recommend that you download the Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate 2 sources right now via our website or from kernel.org, and install it on a PC you use only for testing purposes. Under any circumstance, do not replace your stable kernel packages with this one, as they're still considered work in progress.