Fifth Release Candidate is now available for public testing

Oct 17, 2017 15:42 GMT  ·  By

Development of Linux 4.14, the next LTS (Long Term Support) kernel series, continues with the fifth RC (Release Candidate) milestone, which was announced by Linus Torvalds himself this past weekend.

According to Linus Torvalds, things have finally starting to calm down for the development of the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel, and it looks like the RC5 snapshot is smaller than he would have expected, at least smaller than last week's RC4, which is a good thing, meaning that there won't be need for eight RCs during this cycle.

"We've certainly had smaller rc5's, but we've had bigger ones too, and this week finally felt fairly normal in a release that has up until now felt a bit messier than it perhaps should have been," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "So assuming this trend holds, we're all good. Knock wood."

Linux kernel 4.14 LTS expected to arrive on November 5

Now that the development cycle of the Linux 4.14 kernel gets closer to an end with the RC5 snapshot already out the door on October 15, we can say that the final release of the next long-term supported kernel series should arrive on November 5, 2017. Only two RCs are left for this cycle, RC6 on October 22 and RC7 on October 29.

The Linux 4.14 LTS kernel packs numerous new features and support for newer hardware through updated drivers. However, the fifth Release Candidate contains updates for the x86, PowerPC and MIPS architectures, as well as for GPU, USB, networking and sound drivers, and various core kernel changes for networking, lockdep, and mm.

Some tooling (perf and selftests) fixes are there as well in Linux kernel 4.14 RC5, whose source tarball you can download right now from kernel.org or via our web portal if you want to test it on your favorite GNU/Linux distro, but please keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel with this pre-release version.