14 DAY TRIAL // It's Sunday again, so Linus Torvalds has announced the general availability of a new RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel, which users can take for a test drive as we speak.
Linux 4.7-rc3 is the third Release Candidate version in the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.7, the next major kernel branch, which should see the light of day sometime in mid-July. And according to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.7 RC3 appears to be a fairly quiet release whose only major change is a fix for a pending NFS issue.
"Nothing particularly odd has been going on. As promised, rc3 has the fix for the NFS issue that was pending last rc. Not that anybody seems to have noticed (also as expected)," says Linus Torvalds. "The diffstat looks fairly normal and innocuous. But it all is pretty small."
What else is new in Linux kernel 4.7 Release Candidate 3? Well, looking at the appended shortlog, we can notice the addition of some new tests for the Btrfs file systems, many updated drivers, in particular for GPU, networking, I2C, and RDMA ones, various architecture improvements, and an updated networking stack.
Linux kernel 4.7 RC4 coming next week
Next Sunday, the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.7 will continue with the fourth Release Candidate (RC) build, which should bring more changes and improvements to the upcoming kernel series that many GNU/Linux operating system will adopt and use as the default kernel.
Most probably, there will be a total of seven RC development versions for Linux kernel 4.7 until it hits the streets in mid-July. But until then, you can download Linux kernel 4.7 RC3 right now via our website or directly from kernel.org and start testing it. Please keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version, not ready for production use.