14 DAY TRIAL // It's still Sunday in the US, and that means Linus Torvalds has prepared yet another Release Candidate (RC) milestone for the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel for GNU/Linux distros.
That's right, Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 3 is now ready for public testing, and according to Linus Torvalds, it appears to be a fairly normal patch that's just a bit larger than last week's Release Candidate because of a typo that affected the PowerPC (PPC) and ARM architectures.
"Another week, another RC. As is our usual pattern after the merge window, RC3 is larger than RC2, but this is hopefully the point where things start to shrink and calm down," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "On the whole RC3 looks pretty normal."
As for the changes, it appears that two-thirds of the Linux kernel 4.11 RC3 release are updated drivers for things like qla2xxx, Ethernet Broadcom and Cavium, GPU, CPUFreq, MD, and others, with the rest being split between various improvements to the x86, PowerPC and PA-RISC architectures, updates to the XFS, NFS, and AFS filesystems, as well as general networking and core kernel fixes.
Linux kernel 4.11 should hit stable at the end of April
Looking at the way the development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel advances, we can guess that the final release will hit the stable channel sometime at the end of April, either on the 23rd or the 30th, depending on whether it will receive seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) builds.
Of course, that always depends on Linus Torvalds and if the patch will get a flood of changes or not when it nears end of development. Until then, you can now download the Linux 4.10 RC3 kernel source tarball from kernel.org or via our website if you want to get an early taste of the new features or simply want to help with the bug reporting.