14 DAY TRIAL // A few moments ago, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday evening announcement to inform us about the general availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel.
According to Linus Torvalds, things appear to be back to their normal state, and it looks like Linux kernel 4.10 RC3 is a fairly normal development release that consists of two-thirds updated drivers, and half of the remaining part of the patch are improvements to various hardware architectures. There are also some minor networking and filesystems fixes.
"So after that very small rc2 due to the xmas break, we seem to be back to fairly normal," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "It still feels a bit smaller than a usual rc3, but for the first real rc after the merge window (ie I'd compare it to a regular rc2), it's fairly normal."
You can go out and test Linux kernel 4.10-rc3
If you've been waiting to test drive a new Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel, this is the moment you've been waiting for, as RC3 appears to be the first "real" RC build of the series, as you probably already know that the second one was ridiculously and unrealistically small, while the first one landed on Christmas Day.
Download the Linux kernel 4.10 RC3 source archive right now from our website if you plan on getting out and testing it, to report bugs or see if your hardware is supported/works better with the improved drivers, but please try not to replace your stable kernel with this one, nor to install/use it on production environments.
The development cycle of the Linux 4.10 kernel is back on track, which means that we should see more goodies with the next Release Candidates, RC4 coming December 15. Considering the fact that things were so slow until now, there might be eight RCs released for Linux 4.10, which should hit the streets around Valentine's Day.
In the meantime, if you're using a stable and modern GNU/Linux distribution, we recommend checking out the first point release of the Linux 4.9 kernel series, which is now marked as stable and ready for production use. You can download the source archive from the same location as above or install Linux kernel 4.9.1 from the main repos.