14 DAY TRIAL // Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability for testing of the second RC (Release Candidate) of the upcoming major release of the Linux kernel, Linux 5.0.
According to Linus Torvalds, things are going in the right direction for Linux kernel 5.0 series, which should launch sometime at the end of February or early March 2019, and the second Release Candidate is here to add several perf tooling improvements, updated networking, SCSI, GPU, and block drivers, updated x86, ARM, RISC-V, and C-SKY architectures, as well as fixes to Btrfs and CIFS filesystems.
"So the merge window had somewhat unusual timing with the holidays, and I was afraid that would affect stragglers in rc2, but honestly, that doesn't seem to have happened much. rc2 looks pretty normal. Were there some missing commits that missed the merge window? Yes. But no more than usual. Things look pretty normal," said Linus Torvalds in a mailing list announcement.
Linux kernel 5.0 RC3 expected on January 17th
Of course, it's a bit early to say that everything's fairly normal for the Linux 5.0 kernel series as the development cycle was just kicked off a week ago, when Linus Torvalds announced the first Release Candidate, and it remains to be seen if it will be a normal cycle with seven RCs or a long one with eight RCs. Depending on that, Linux kernel 5.0 could arrive on February 24th or March 3rd.
Until then, we're looking forward to the third Release Candidate of Linux kernel 5.0, which is expected to hit the streets at the end of the week on January 17th. Meanwhile, you can go ahead and give Linux 5.0 a try on your Linux-powered computer by downloading and compiling the second Release Candidate from kernel.org. Keep in mind though that this is a pre-release version, so don't use it on production machines.