14 DAY TRIAL // In an unfortunate turn of events, Linus Torvalds announced just a few minutes ago the availability of another RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.10 RC8 is now available for public testing despite the fact that not much has happened since last week's RC7 snapshot, which should have been the last in the series. But things don't always go as planned, and it looks like there were a bunch of small last-minute regression fixes that needed to be implemented.
"Hey, it's another week, and I could have released the final 4.10," said Linus Torvalds. "But I decided that there's also no huge overriding reason to do so (other than getting back to the usual 'rc7 is the last rc' schedule, which would have been nice), and with travel coming up, I decided that I didn't really need to open the merge window."
Therefore, the main problem here is the fact that Linus Torvalds will be on the road next week and he decided not to open the merge window for the next Linux kernel branch, namely Linux 4.11. "I've done merge windows during travel before, but I just prefer not to," said Torvalds in the mailing list announcement.
Linux kernel 4.10 will now land on February 19
As for the changes implemented in this last RC build of Linux kernel 4.10, we can mention the usual driver updates, various improvements to x86, PowerPC (PPC) and ARM architectures, some networking and some filesystem fixes, and a little bit of documentation, perf, header files, and tooling changes.
Therefore, it now looks like the final Linux 4.10 kernel will be released next week, on February 19, 2017. Until then, you can now download the Linux kernel 4.10 Release Candidate 8 tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to take it for a test drive on your favorite GNU/Linux OS.