14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds kicked off the development of the Linux 4.12 kernel series by announcing the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) a day earlier than expected due to the Mother's Day celebration and last-minute pull requests.
According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.12 RC1 is a pretty large patch that contains numerous additions, including support for AMD's next-generation Radeon RX Vega GPUs, along with a new driver for Intel Atom IPUs (Image Processing Units).
The rest of the changes consist of miscellaneous updates to various support hardware architectures, filesystems, networking drivers, headers, documentation, and core files. As usual, you can always study the appended shortlog if you're curious to know what devices or drivers have been updated.
"Despite it being fairly large, it has (so far) been pretty smooth. I don't think I personally saw any breakage at all, which is always nice. Usually I end up having something break, or trigger some silly build failure that really should have been noticed before it even got to me, but so far things are looking good," said Torvalds.
Linux kernel 4.12 should hit the streets in early July 2017
We're aware of the fact that development of the Linux 4.12 kernel series just started with this first Release Candidate (RC) build, but we can also estimate its arrival date, which should be in early July, either the 2nd or the 9th, depending on if there will be seven or eight such RC versions released during its entire cycle.
There's a lot of time until then, and if you want to get an early taste of the Linux 4.12 kernel series, download the RC1 tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to compile it for your architecture in an attempt to report any bugs you might encounter. Please don't use this kernel in a stable, production environment.