14 DAY TRIAL // If Santa didn't come by last night, we'd like to inform you that Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel as a Christmas present to Linux geeks around the world.
If you're watching the Linux kernel scene, you probably know that there have been two weeks since the launch of the Linux 4.9 kernel, which appeared to be the biggest kernel version ever released. This means that the merge window for Linux kernel 4.10, which is not as big as Linux kernel 4.9 was, is now officially closed and it's time for us to test drive the RC1 milestone.
"It's Christmas Day, and it's two weeks since the merge window opened. Thus, the merge window is now closed," said Linus Torvalds. "On the whole, this wasn't all that big a release - nothing like 4.9. Although it wasn't tiny either. I think 4.7 was smaller. 4.8 might have been too. It's xmas day, and right now I can't be arsed to actually do the statistics I'd normally do."
Half of the patch are updated drivers, the rest is just the usual noise
According to Linus Torvalds, half of the Linux kernel 4.10 Release Candidate 1 patch includes updated drivers for various devices. The rest is just the usual noise with documentation, perf tooling updates, and architecture improvements standing out from the crowd. Of course, Linux gamers would be happy to learn that there's better support for AMD Radeon graphics cards, too.
If you have nothing else better to do on Christmas Day and want to take this first RC of Linux kernel 4.10 for a test drive on your hardware, we invite you to download the source archive right now from kernel.org or via our web portal and compile it yourself. Just please try to keep in mind that this is a very early development build that should not be deployed on production environments.