14 DAY TRIAL // The Easter Bunny brought us another Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel, as announced by Linus Torvalds on Sunday evening.
Linux kernel 4.11 RC7 is here, as expected, one week after the previous Release Candidate build, and according to Linus Torvalds' announcement, it could also be the last in the series, marking the end of the development cycle for Linux kernel 4.11, which could land as soon as next week if nothing surprising, unexpected happens.
"Things have been pretty calm this past week (the beginning of the week seemed particularly calm, and then, as usual, Friday happened...)," said Linus Torvalds. "We have a number of reverts for things that didn't work out and aren't worth trying to fix at this point, that's also normal (and people will look at it for the next version instead)."
Linux kernel 4.11 might hit the stable channel on April 23, 2017
The seventh Release Candidate of the Linux 4.11 kernel doesn't appear to be much bigger than any of the previous RCs, shipping with mostly updated drivers, improvements for the ARM, IA64, PA-RISC and x86 hardware architectures, as well as various bug fixes to the Btrfs, CIFS, and OrangeFS filesystems.
The usual core kernel, tooling, and header file changes are present as well, and since an eighth Release Candidate isn't planned for next week, the final release of Linux kernel 4.11 might hit the stable channel on April 23, 2017. But for that to happen, Linus Torvalds invites you to take this possibly last RC for a test drive.
You can download the Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 7 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to test it, but please try to keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel with it, nor install this development build on a production machine. Don't forget to report any bugs!