14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds just announced a few moments ago the release and immediate availability for download of the seventh RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.15 has been in development since the end of November 2017, and it's now time the development cycle to come to an end, and today's Release Candidate brings even more of the x86 page table isolation (PTI) patches to mitigate those nasty Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities that put billions of devices at risk of attacks.
"Ok, we had an interesting week, and by now everybody knows why we were merging all those odd x86 page table isolation patches without following all of the normal release timing rules," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "Anyway, due to this all, 4.15 will obviously be one of the releases with an rc8, even if things are starting to really calm down by now."
Linux kernel 4.15 expected to arrive on January 21, 2018
Besides the x86 PTI patches to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre hardware bugs affecting all devices running processors made in the past 25 years, the seventh Release Candidate of the Linux 4.15 kernel series includes various updated GPU, crypto, input layer, and platform drivers, as well as some small improvements for various filesystems and architectures.
That begin said, you can download the Linux kernel 4.15 Release Candidate 7 right now from kernel.org or via our web portal if you want to take it for a test drive on your favorite operating system, but please keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel with this pre-release version, nor use it in a production environment. Linux kernel 4.15 is expected to arrive in two weeks, on January 21, 2018.