14 DAY TRIAL // As it's Sunday here in the US, Linus Torvalds just published his regular, weekly announcement to announce a new RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the forthcoming Linux 4.13 kernel series.
Last week's RC5 release was smaller than the previous fourth Release Candidate, and Linus Torvalds was confident that things would progress normally for this development cycle. And he was right, as RC6 seems to be a normal patch, not to mention that things were quite calm during the past week. It brings only a few updated networking, sound, and InfiniBand drivers, along with some architecture improvements.
"Things have been pretty calm, and RC6 is out there. Nothing particular really stands out," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "So everything still looks on target for a normal release schedule, which would imply RC7 next weekend, and then the final 4.13 the week after that. Unless something happens, of course."
Final Linux 4.13 kernel release to debut on September 3, 2017
Therefore, it's no-brainer that the seventh and probably last Release Candidate milestone will arrive next week, on August 27, and the final Linux 4.13 kernel release should debut a week later, on September 3, 2017. That, of course, if tomorrow's solar eclipse won't "brings doom and gloom even beyond the expected Oregon trafficalypse," as Linus Torvalds noted at the end of his announcement.
On a more serious note, you're invited to download the source tarball of the Linux kernel 4.13 RC6 release right now from kernel.org or via our website, and take it for a test drive on your computers. However, please try to keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel with this development snapshot, nor deploy it on production machines. Don't forget to report bugs, if you encouter any.