Linux kernel 4.9-rc7 is now ready for public testing

Nov 27, 2016 22:00 GMT  ·  By

It's Sunday here in the US, and for hardcore Linux users, this means that they test drive yet another RC (Release Candidate) build of the soon-to-be-released Linux 4.9 kernel.

That's right, Linus Torvalds has just made his weekly announcement to inform the Linux community on the immediate availability of the seventh Release Candidate (RC7) development milestone for the upcoming Linux kernel 4.9 series, which has been delayed for a week due to the size of the patch.

According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.9 RC7 ships with mostly networking and architecture updates, but also a bunch of updated drivers for things like GPU, USB, IOMMU, I2C, and HID. An eBPF fix is also present, along with various filesystem fixes and core kernel improvements. Check out the appended shortlog for all the technical details.

"I think we got all the silly problems I was aware of fixed, and on the whole things are looking pretty good. In fact, if next week ends up being very quiet, this _might_ be the last RC, although honestly I strongly suspect I'll end up doing an RC8. It's been a big release, and RC7 could have been quieter," said Linus Torvalds.

Linux kernel 4.9 is hitting the streets in early December

Looking at how things have progressed since the first RC of the Linux 4.9 kernel series, we're pretty sure that there will be one last Release Candidate version, which should land for public testing on December 4. After that, the final Linux kernel 4.9 release is hitting the streets on December 11, 2016.

We'd like to be wrong on this and hope Linus Torvalds will change his mind, pushing the stable release a week earlier, because Linux kernel 4.9 promises support for AMD Radeon graphics cards from the SI family if the latest AMDGPU open-source driver is installed. Until then, you can download and test Linux kernel 4.9 RC7 right now.