Linux kernel 4.5 RC1 is now available for download

Jan 25, 2016 00:30 GMT  ·  By

Just a few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel series.

Now that the development cycle of the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel has ended, the time has come for the Linux kernel developers to concentrate their efforts on the next major release, Linux kernel 4.5, which anyone can now download (see link at the end of the article) and test on their Linux machines.

According to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.5 Release Candidate 1 is a fairly normal build. Thus, it consists of approximately 70% drivers updates, especially for things like GPU, sound, networking, fbdev, and staging, architecture updates, mostly for ARM, but also for x86, s390, PowerPC (PPC), and MIPS.

"On the Arch front, it's probably worth mentioning that apparently the arm people have finalized their platform work, and that you really can build a generic ARM kernel for all the ARMv6/7 platforms (and describe the hardware with devicetree). It's been many years in coming. Good job," said Linus Torvalds.

Filesystem, networking and core kernel updates

Besides the updated drivers and architectures mentioned above, the first Release Candidate build of Linux kernel 4.5 comes with the usual filesystem improvements, updates to the networking stack, documentation fixes, several mm cleanups, as well as various small core kernel updates.

If you plan on testing Linux kernel 4.5 Release Candidate 1 on your GNU/Linux box, we would like to inform you that it's a pre-release version, and it shouldn't be installed in a production environment. You can download Linux kernel 4.5 RC1 right now via Softpedia or from the kernel.org website and start compiling it. More details about what was implemented in this release can be found in the changelog.