14 DAY TRIAL // It's Sunday, which means that just a few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds made his regular announcement regarding the availability of a new RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel.
That's right, the sixth RC of Linux kernel 4.9 is now ready for public testing, and according to Linus Torvalds, it's a fairly normal patch and things have stayed pretty calm since last week's RC4 milestone. As for the changes, Linux kernel 4.9 RC6 ships with RDMA updates, GPU fixes, minor build and tooling improvements, several Arch updates (ARM, PowerPC, x86, Xtensa), and other small changes here and there.
"We're getting further in the rc series, and while things have stayed pretty calm, I'm not sure if we're quite there yet. There's a few outstanding issues that just shouldn't be issues at rc6 time, so we'll just have to see. This may be one of those releases that have an rc8, which considering the size of 4.9 is perhaps not that unusual," wrote Linus Torvalds in today's announcement.
Linux kernel 4.9 might arrive on December 11, could be the next LTS branch
Now that Linus Torvalds tells us there might be eight Release Candidate milestones released during the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.9, we can tell you that the final release is hitting the streets on December 11, 2016. But shortly after that date, several rolling Linux distributions will adopt it, and we'll finally be able to enjoy better AMD graphics on your Linux OSes.
Until then, we'll have to test drive two more RC builds, namely RC7 and RC8, which should be out on November 27 and December 4, respectively. However, right now you can download the fifth RC version of Linux kernel 4.9 from kernel.org or via our web portal and take it for a test driver. Please try not to replace your stable kernel with this development version, nor use it in production environments.