14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds doesn't take a break, not even on New Year's Eve, and he just announced the release of the sixth RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel series.
It looks like the development of Linux kernel 4.15 wasn't interrupted by the winter holidays, nor the new year's celebrations, so public testers can now get their hands on the sixth Release Candidate, which brings lots of x86 updates, updated USB, RDMA, networking, and sound drivers, some perf tooling, as well as core networking and IRQ fixes.
"One last RC at the end of the year - and a Happy New Year to everybody," says Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "This would have been a very quiet week, if it wasn't for the final x86 PTI stuff - and that shows in the diffstat too. About half the rc6 work is x86 updates. The timing for this isn't wonderful, but it all looks nice and clean."
Linux kernel 4.15 expected to launch on January 21, 2018
Due to the fact that half the changes included in this sixth Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.15 are the final x86 PTI work, Linus Torvalds is confident that there will be an eight RC released during this development cycle, which pushes the final Linux 4.15 kernel launch into the middle of January 2018. And that's simply because of the bad timing of the patches.
So the next Release Candidate will be RC7, expected to arrive next week, on January 7, 2018, and the eighth RC should land on January 14. After that, the final release of Linux kernel 4.15 will hit the streets on January 21, 2018. Until then, you can download the Linux kernel 4.15 RC6 source tarball right now from kernel.org and take it for a test drive on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.