14 DAY TRIAL // The first Release Candidate (RC) snapshot of the Linux 4.9 kernel was announced by Linus Torvalds on October 15, 2016, which means that the merge window is now close and development has begun.
According to Linus Torvalds, the Linux kernel 4.9 merge window was pretty big and that's why we're seeing the first Release Candidate build a day earlier than expected. Another reason for shipping the RC1 earlier is to not encourage kernel developers to send in last-minute pull requests.
"But hey, it's all good now, and while 4.9 looks to be a big release and we had a couple of hiccups, on the whole things look normal. The big new thing is the greybus addition, which Greg swears is actually getting used. But the bulk of the changes by far is actually a lot of small details under the hood, as usual," says Linus Torvalds.
Linux kernel 4.9 will be a big release, launching December 11, 2016
Also according to Linus Torvalds' announcement, it appears that the Linux 4.9 kernel branch will be a big one, as it could receive eight Release Candidate builds during its entire development cycle, which might come to an end in the first week of December. Therefore, Linux kernel 4.9 may launch on December 11, 2016.
There will be a bunch of interesting and useful features implemented in Linux kernel 4.9, starting with Andy Lutomirski's new virtually mapped kernel stack allocations for finding and recovering from stack overflows much more easily. There will be some VFS and uaccess cleanups as well, also thanks to Andy Lutomirski.
The mergelog has been appended below for those curious to know what exactly has been added in the first Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.9. In the meantime, you can download Linux kernel 4.9 RC1 right now from the kernel.org website or via ours, compile it for your hardware architectures, and take it for a test drive to report bugs.