14 DAY TRIAL // As expected on a late Sunday evening, Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing a few moments ago the immediate availability of the second Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series.
According to Linus Torvalds, the Linux 4.12 RC2 kernel patch is a little bigger than last week's first Release Candidate, but nothing out of the ordinary. It includes updated networking, GPU, USB, MD, watchdog, and staging drivers, improvements to the x86, ARM64 (AArch64), ARM, s390 and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, KVM updates, as well as various core networking, bpf, and filesystems changes.
"I'm back on the usual Sunday schedule, and everything else looks fairly normal too. This RC2 is maybe a bit bigger than usual, but the whole merge window was bigger than most, so maybe it's just that. And it's not like it's huge - usually the RC2 week is fairly quiet as people find issues," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement.
Linux kernel 4.12 to launch in early July 2017
The final release of the Linux 4.12 kernel series is expected in early July, be it either on July 2, 2017, or at the end of the first week of the month, which depends on whether there will be seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) builds published. However, the release date might suffer a delay if Linus Torvalds can't announce the final version.
But there's a lot of time until then, and if you're an early adopter, you should take this second Release Candidate of the Linux 4.12 kernel series for a test drive right now by downloading the source tarball from kernel.org and compiling it on your testing machine(s). However, please don't use this kernel on a production system or replace your stable kernel packages with it.