Users can now test the third RC build of Linux kernel 4.5

Feb 8, 2016 00:30 GMT  ·  By

It's Sunday afternoon here in the US, so guess what? Linus Torvalds has just made his regular announcement about the general availability of a new Release Candidate build of Linux kernel 4.5.

It looks to us like the development cycle of the Linux kernel is pretty fast, and that's a good thing for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. We are provided with a new Release Candidate (RC) build every week, and a new kernel release gets approximately seven RCs before the final version debuts, which means that every three months or so we get a new branch.

According to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.5 RC3 is bigger than expected, but not that big, and compared with last week's Release Candidate 2 build, it removes some patches related to the staging RDMA drivers, which occupy 90% of the changelog. The rest of 10% is mostly drivers, especially for things like networking, GPU, USB, and sound.

"It's slightly bigger than I'd like, but not excessively so (and not unusually so). Most of the patches are pretty small, although the diff is utterly dominated by the (big) removal a couple of staging rdma drivers that just weren't going anywhere. Those removal patches are 90% of the bulk of the diff," said Linus Torvalds.

Linux 4.5-rc3 is now ready for testing

Besides the updated drivers and the removal of the staging RDMA patches, the third Release Candidate build of Linux kernel 4.5 adds core networking improvements, various VM fixes, some crypto changes, as well as ARM SoC fixes. Linux kernel 4.5 RC3 is now available for download from the regular places.

We're informing you that this is a pre-release version, which means that you shouldn't install it on your production-ready machine or replace your GNU/Linux distribution's stable kernel package with it. If the development cycle continues at this speed, we will see the final Linux kernel 4.5  release sometime in March 2016.