Linux 4.6-rc7 is now available for public testing

May 8, 2016 22:25 GMT  ·  By

Just a few moments ago, May 8, 2016, Linus Torvalds has made his regular Sunday evening announcement to inform us about the availability of another RC (Release Candidate) build of the forthcoming Linux 4.6 kernel branch.

But this time, things are a little different because he announced Linux kernel 4.6 RC7, which, as expected, is the last Release Candidate in the upcoming series, or at least that's how he sees things because it was a very quiet development cycle. So, if everything remains as quiet as it has been until today, next week we should see the final release of Linux kernel 4.6.

"So here's rc7, because while things were really quiet there for a while, it never got *so* quiet that I would decide that there's no point to making the traditional last rc. But this is it, unless something surprising happens," said Linus Torvalds. "Nothing particularly scary, and the more people who test this out, the more confident we can be that the final 4.6 is all good."

What's new in Linux kernel 4.6 Release Candidate 7

Again, things remain very quiet and relatively small even for this last Release Candidate build of Linux kernel 4.6, which introduces some minor driver fixes, various small updates to some hardware architectures, a few changes to the networking stack, as well as a couple of core kernel and filesystems improvements. But don't hesitate to take a look at the appended shortlog for more info.

In the meantime, if you want to help with the testing of Linux kernel 4.6 Release Candidate 7, you can download the sources right now via our website or directly from kernel.org, compile it and report bugs if you find any. And please try not to replace your stable kernel with this pre-release version. The final Linux kernel 4.6 release should land on May 15, 2016.