Linux 4.14 RC1 is now available for public testing

Sep 18, 2017 20:30 GMT  ·  By

A day early than expected, Linux creator Linus Torvalds cautiously kicked off the development of the Linux 4.14 kernel series, which looks to be the next LTS (Long Term Support) branch, with the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone.

That's right, two weeks after the release of Linux kernel 4.13, which is currently the most stable and advanced kernel series, being adopted by more and more GNU/Linux distributions each day, the first RC development snapshot of Linux kernel 4.14 is ready for public testing, officially closing the merge window. And it looks like some core new functionality will be implemented in this release.

"Things don't look bad, but I hate it when I find issues during the merge window," said Linus Torvalds. "Admittedly, some of it was simply because we had some unusual activity. For example, on the x86 VM side, 4.14 doesn't just have _one_ new core memory management feature, but three: 5-level page tables, ASID support and the AMD memory encryption support."

Linux kernel 4.14 LTS is shipping early November 2017

Of course, Linux kernel 4.14 LTS promises to bring a lot of updated drivers for various devices, architecture updates, new documentation, as well as a bunch of improvements to supported filesystems, core networking, tooling, and more. You should check out the mergelog attached to Linus Torvalds' mailing list announcement for details on what landed in this release.

If everything goes well this cycle, we're looking at the final release of Linux kernel 4.14 LTS to ship early November, either of the 5th (if it gets the regular seven RCs) or on the 12th (if it gets eight RCs). Until then, you can download the Linux 4.14 RC1 kernel source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to take it for a test drive on your machine, but don't replace your stable kernel with it.