14 DAY TRIAL // It's Sunday evening here in the US, which means that Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of yet another RC (Release Candidate) development snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel series.
Last week's RC4 release was bigger than usual, but it looks like the RC5 milestone is smaller, and things appear to progress pretty normally for the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.13. According to Linus Torvalds, the final release of the Linux 4.13 kernel series should not suffer any delays.
As for the changes implemented in Linux kernel 4.13 RC5, we're looking at the patch containing about 40% updated drivers, just under 40% improvements to various of the supported architectures, which is mainly due to a single MIPS BPF JIT file, and the rest of 20% is split between core networking and VM fixes, header files, and scripting updates.
"Things are progressing pretty normally. RC5 is smaller than RC4 was, and nothing looks particularly scary for this release window," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "Go forth and test, and everything says that we'll get 4.13 out in our usual timely manner."
Linux kernel 4.13 to hit the streets in early September 2017
Therefore, we can only hope that Linux kernel 4.13 is hitting the streets very early next month, on September 3 to be more precise, as the sixth and seventh Release Candidate snapshots are expected to launch on August 20 and 27, respectively. However, it will take a couple of weeks until we'll be able to install the Linux 4.13 kernel on our favorite GNU/Linux distros and enjoy its new features.
Until then, those who want to help report bugs can download the Linux kernel 4.13 RC5 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our web portal, and install it on a testing computer. Please don't install this pre-release version on a production machine, nor replace your stable kernel packages with it. Linux 4.13 will be the default kernel of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.