14 DAY TRIAL // While the Linux community was looking forwards to the final Linux 4.15 kernel release today, Linus Torvalds just delayed it for another week, announcing the ninth Release Candidate (RC) instead.
It's not every day that you see a ninth Release Candidate in the development cycle of a new Linux kernel branch, but here we go, and we can only blame it on those pesky Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities that affect us all, putting billions of devices at risk of attacks.
That, and the fact that things haven't calmed down since last week's eight Release Candidate, which was supposed to be the last for the upcoming series. According to Linus Torvalds, there are still has some networking fixes pending, and there's also a very subtle boot bug that was discovered the other day.
"I really really wanted to just release 4.15 today, but things haven't calmed down enough for me to feel comfy about it," says Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "So I'm doing an rc9 instead. I don't particularly like to, but I like it even less releasing something that doesn't seem baked enough."
The last Linux kernel branch to get more than eight Release Candidates was Linux 3.1 back in 2011, says Linus Torvalds, who noted that fact that it even got a tenth RC, something that was never repeated. Anyway, Torvalds is confident there's no need for a tenth Release Candidate this time.
No more delays, Linux kernel 4.15 expected on January 28
Anyway, for those interested in what's the rare Linux kernel 4.15 RC9 release brings, we can tell them that contains mostly updates for the x86, ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC architectures, along with some updated GPU, networking and MD drivers. There's also various core networking changes, new selftests, and small tracing and bpf fixes.
Linux kernel 4.15 RC9 is now available for download from kernel.org if you want to take it for a test drive, but we don't recommend to run a pre-release kernel on a production machine, nor to replace your stable kernel with it. The final release of the Linux 4.15 kernel is now expected on January 28, 2018.