Linux 4.14-rc6 is now available for public testing

Oct 26, 2017 20:14 GMT  ·  By

With a one-day delay, the sixth Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 4.14 LTS kernel arrived for public testers, announced by Linus Torvalds himself.

The delay happened because Linus Torvalds had some Internet problems, and this made the Linux kernel 4.14 RC6 milestone a bit bigger than expected. This translates to the fact that it's no longer clear if the next long-term supported kernel series will arrive on time, on November 5, 2017, or if it will get delayed with one week.

"RC6 is a bit larger than I was hoping for, and I'm not sure whether that is a sign that we _will_ need an RC8 after all this release (which wouldn't be horribly surprising), or whether it's simply due to timing. I'm going to leave that open for now, so just know that RC8 _may_ happen," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement.

What's new in Linux kernel 4.14 LTS Release Candidate 6

The sixth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.14 LTS kernel brings updated drivers, in particular for GPU, USB, networking, media, and input, some selftest updates, various improvements to supported architectures and filesystems, as well as documentation and updates and a few core kernel and key handling changes.

If you want to take this pre-release version for a test drive, you can do so by downloading the Linux kernel 4.14 RC6 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website. However, please don't replace your stable kernel with it, nor deploy it in a production environment.

In theory, the development cycle of the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel should conclude next week with the seventh Release Candidate, but if there's need for an eight RC, the final release could slip to mid-November. So Linux kernel 4.14 LTS is expected either on the 5th or 12th November, and will be supported for the next six years.