14 DAY TRIAL // The development cycle of the Linux 4.15 kernel continues as usual, and Linus Torvalds announced the fourth Release Candidate (RC) over the weekend noting that things are finally calming down.
While last week's RC3 release of Linux kernel 4.15 was bigger than expected, it would appear that the RC4 build is "about average size," according to Linus Torvalds. This is a good thing, of course, signaling that the final Linux 4.15 kernel release could land in time, but the winter holidays could stand in its way after all.
"I would like to say that I hope things will continue to calm down, but I already know I have more stuff pending," says Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "That, together with the holidays, makes me strongly suspect that this will be one of those "we'll do an RC8" releases, but we'll see."
As promised, the suspend/resume handling is now fixed in RC4, which finally removes the cross-locking debug code that caused problems to kernel developers. Also, it contains that usual driver updates, filesystem fixes, networking and tooling improvements. Check out the appended shortlog for more details on the changes.
Fifth Linux kernel 4.15 Release Candidate lands on Christmas Eve
The next Release Candidate for the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel will be RC5, and it is expected to land on Christmas Eve, on Sunday, December 24. After that, the development cycle will continue most probably next year with the RC6 and RC7 releases throughout January, as we don't believe there will be a New Year's Eve release.
That being said, we're looking at the second half of January 2018 for the release of Linux kernel 4.15, which will add support for new hardware and dozens of other improvements. Until then, you can test drive Linux kernel 4.15 RC4 right now by downloading the source tarball from kernel.org or via our Linux software portal. Please keep in mind not to replace your stable kernels with this pre-release version!