Linux 4.11-rc8 is now available for public testing

Apr 24, 2017 21:50 GMT  ·  By

We were expecting so see the final release of the Linux 4.11 kernel launch on Sunday evening, but it didn't happen as Linus Torvalds announced the eighth and last Release Candidate (RC) version instead.

According to Linus Torvalds, the release of Linux kernel 4.11 should have happened on Sunday, April 23, 2017, but things don't always go as planned, and it looks like some last minute blockers, such as some nasty issues with the NVMe power management support, were discovered, which is the main reason we see the RC8 build.

"So originally I was just planning on releasing the final 4.11 today, but while we didn't have a *lot* of changes the last week, we had a couple of really annoying ones, so I'm doing another RC release instead. I did get fixes for the issues that popped up, so I could have released 4.11 as-is, but it just doesn't feel right," said Torvalds.

Linux kernel 4.11 slated for release on April 30, 2017

Linus Torvalds urges everyone willing to take this last Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.11 for a test drive to go out and test the strange NVMe issue that also appears to affect some particular platforms. If everything goes well, we can expect to get our hands on the final release of Linux 4.11 on April 30, 2017, but it will take a while before we can update our systems.

Therefore, you can download the Linux kernel 4.11 RC8 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to take it for a test drive, but please try to remember that this is still a pre-release version, so don't replace your stable kernel build with it, nor use it in production machines. Make sure you check out the mailing list announcement for all the technical details.