14 DAY TRIAL // It's Sunday night, so guess what? Yes, that's right, Linus Torvalds has just announced the availability of the seventh Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel branch.
According to Linus Torvalds, things have again calmed down, and it looks like, with the exception of a couple of regressions, this could just be the last Release Candidate (RC) for Linux kernel 4.7, which means that the final release will be announced soon. Unfortunately, Mr. Torvalds will be on the move next week, so he'll make the announcement one week later, on July 24, 2016.
"We've had a nicely calm week, which is what I expected - the last RC really was bigger just due to random timing issues, and not some worrying pattern about this release cycle," said Linus Torvalds in today's announcement. "Anyway, there's a couple of regressions still being looked at, but unless anything odd happens, this is going to be the last RC. However, due to my travel schedule, I won't be doing the final 4.7 next weekend."
What's new in Linux kernel 4.7 RC7
Since last week's pretty big Linux kernel 4.7 RC6 milestone, the seventh and, most probably, the last Release Candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel series is here to add the usual updated drivers for things like sound, networking, gpio, etc., hardware architecture fixes, core kernel improvements, small networking stack changes, and minor enhancements to the eCryptfs enterprise cryptographic filesystem.
That being said, you can now download the Linux kernel 4.7 RC7 source archive right now via our website, or directly from kernel.org, compile and install it for your architecture, and take it for a test drive. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, which you shouldn't use to replace the stable kernel in your GNU/Linux operating system.