14 DAY TRIAL // A day early than initially expected, the development of the Linux 4.13 kernel was kicked off by Linus Torvalds himself with the first Release Candidate (RC) in the series.
The merge window was opened during the past two weeks, since the launch of the Linux 4.12 kernel, which is now stable and ready for deployment, so Linus Torvalds decided to close it a day early to avoid late pull requests and push the first Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.13 out the door for public testing, which seems to be quite huge, but it's normal for this stage.
"I was planning on doing it yesterday evening this time around because I was so annoyed with lots of late pull requests on Friday (and some today), but ended up going to dinner and not getting everything done," said Linus Torvalds. "This looks like a fairly regular release, and as always, RC1 is much too large to post even the shortlog for."
More work on AMD GPUs, updated drivers
Linux kernel 4.13 RC1 saw a lot of work done to improve support for AMD Radeon GPUs, but it also comes with numerous updated drivers, and the usual performance improvements for various hardware architectures, the networking stack, tooling, and other core kernel changes. Documentation updates are also present in a continues effort to clean things up and regularize them in the Linux kernel.
As Linus Torvalds notes at the end of his mailing list announcement, get testing by downloading the source tarball of Linux kernel 4.13 RC1 right now from kernel.org or via our website. However, please try to keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel packages with this one, nor deploy it in a production environment. RC builds are only meant for testing purposes, so do report any bugs you may encounter.