14 DAY TRIAL // Even if it's Memorial weekend, Linus Torvalds is on the job announcing the release and immediate availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series.
According to Linus Torvalds, the development of Linux kernel 4.12 continues to look good, and today's third Release Candidate build is a fairly normal patch consisting of two thirds updated GPU, SCSI, NVME, TTY, and Block drivers, and the rest is split between networking stack changes, core kernel, header files, XFS, and Arch improvements. The biggest change, however, is a documentation update as the Intel pstate docs were converted to the RST format.
"Hey, things continue to look good, and RC3 isn't even very big. I'm hoping there's not another shoe about to drop, but so far this really feels like a nice calm release cycle, despite the size of the merge window. Knock wood," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "Anyway, RC3 has a little bit of everything. The biggest single change is actually just a documentation update."
Linux kernel 4.12 to hit the streets in early July 2017
The development cycle of the Linux 4.12 kernel series is still in early stages and we should expect to see at least four such Release Candidate (RC) versions released in the coming weeks, which can only mean that Linux kernel 4.12 will hit the streets in early July 2017, be it either the 2nd or the 9th, depending on if there will be seven or eight RCs released.
Until then, you can help with the testing by downloading the Linux kernel 4.12 Release Candidate 3 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website, compiling and installing it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, and then reporting bugs on the issue tracker. Please try to keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel with this development version, nor deploy it on a production environment.