Linux 4.9-rc2 is now available for public testing

Oct 24, 2016 00:40 GMT  ·  By

It's still Sunday in the US, which means that it's time for you to take yet another RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel release for a test drive.

That's right, Linus Torvalds just announced the second Release Candidate for Linux kernel 4.9, which lands eight days after the first one and appears to be a fairly normal development snapshot that includes lots of updated drivers, mostly for GPU, but also HID, SCSI, MMC, PINCTRL, IMPI, and clocksource, various x86 and ARM64 architecture updates, improvements to the EXT4, F2FS, Ceph, and NFS filesystems, and some VM cleanups.

"Because 4.9 is obviously shaping up to be a big release (I haven't done the actual stats yet, but I think it's the biggest in number of commits we've ever had), and I think Greg is also planning on making it an LTS release. The two may be related, with people pushing to get their stuff ready. Regardless, the more people who help test, and the earlier in the rc series those people start testing, the better off we'll be. Hint hint," says Linus Torvalds in today's announcement.

Linux kernel 4.9 lands in December 2016 for GNU/Linux distros

The development cycle of the Linux 4.9 kernel branch just started, but it looks like it might just be one of those big releases that receive eight Release Candidate snapshots instead of seven, and possibly the next LTS (Long Term Support) branch, which means that the final release should hit the streets in the second week of December, on the 11th. But if things turn out differently, it could be released on December 4, 2016.

Until then, we invite you to download the Linux kernel 4.9 Release Candidate 2 source from the kernel.org website or via ours, compile and install it for your system, and report bugs if you encounter them. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, and you should not replace your stable kernel with it, nor deploy it in stable environments.