Linux 4.10-rc4 is now available for early adopters

Jan 16, 2017 01:03 GMT  ·  By

It's Sunday evening, again, and Linus Torvalds just made his weekly announcement to inform the community about the immediate availability for download of a new Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel.

One more week has passed in our lives, but the development of the Linux kernel never stops, and we're now seeing the release of fourth RC (Release Candidate) build of Linux kernel 4.10, which appears to be fairly normal, yet again, bringing only a collection of assorted bug fixes and improvements compared to last week's release.

Not surprising at all, but the patch consists of mostly drivers; this time GPU, USB, sound, and networking ones stand out. The rest are the usual x86 architecture updates, multiple fixes for the Btrfs, XFS, and VFS filesystems, some tooling (mostly perf) changes, and the usual core kernel and mm changes.

"Things are still looking fairly normal, and this is the usual weekly Sunday rc release. We're up to RC4, and people are clearly starting to find the regressions. Good, good," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "This is also the point where I start hoping that the rc's start shrinking. We'll see how the tiny RC2 affects things - this may technically be RC4, but with that one almost dead week, it feels like RC3."

Linux kernel 4.10 could be launched on mid-February

It's too early to tell if the Linux 4.10 kernel will be a normal release with seven Release Candidate builds pushed during its development cycle or one of those large ones that also get the eighth RC. As such, if Linux kernel 4.10 will get seven RCs, it will be out the door on February 12, 2017, if not, it's hitting the streets a week later, on the 19th.

That being said, you can now get your hands on the RC4 release of Linux kernel 4.10, which you can download either directly from kernel.org or via our website. However, please do not replace your distribution's stable kernel with this development version, nor deploy it on production environments.