14 DAY TRIAL // A day early than expected, the third Release Candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel was announced just a few minutes ago by Linus Torvalds himself because tomorrow he'll be attending the Linux Kernel Summit 2016 event in Santa Fe, USA.
We have to admit that we didn't expect to see the Linux 4.9-rc3 kernel so soon, but it's good news if you're an early adopter and just can't wait to see what goodies the kernel developers have prepared for the final release of Linux kernel 4.9, which should land at the end of the first week of December 2016. One of the biggest changes in today's Linux kernel 4.9 RC3 release is a fix for a bug in the new virtually mapped stacks.
"It turns out that the bug that we thought was due to the new virtually mapped stacks during the rc2 release wasn't due to that at all, but a block request queuing race condition," said Linus Torvalds. "So people who turned off the new feature weren't actually avoiding it at all, but probably the only people who hit it were people like DaveJ who are doing stress-testing. But it's all fixed now, and we should be all set."
Linux kernel 4.9 RC3 is bigger than RC2
According to Linus Torvalds, the Linux kernel 4.9 RC3 release appears to be bigger than the second Release Candidate announced last week, as expected, which means that this kernel branch might receive the eighth RC too. And it's bigger because there are lots of fixes and improvements in many areas, such as the XFS file system, drivers, architectures, etc. Check out the appended shortlog for all the technical details.
If you want to help with the testing of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel, you can download the third Release Candidate build right now from the kernel.org website or via ours and compile the sources for your platform. Keep in mind that this is just a pre-release version, which means that it's not stable enough to be deployed in production environments, nor to replace your stable kernel.