14 DAY TRIAL // Another week passed, another update of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel came today, January 29, 2017, as announced by Linus Torvalds himself just a few moments ago; the sixth Release Candidate (RC) of Linux kernel 4.10.
If last week's fifth RC was relatively normal and kept small, the Linux kernel 4.10 Release Candidate 6 snapshot appears to be much bigger because of a flood of patches that landed on Friday and this weekend. This makes today's RC release the biggest so far for the Linux 4.10 series.
As for the changes, the sixth RC of Linux kernel 4.10 adds numerous updated drivers, this time GPU, MD, media, networking, and RDMA ones, various improvements to the XFS file systems, an updated networking stack, and a bunch of other bug fixes that you can see in the appended shortlog.
"It's still not all that big by historical standards, since 4.10 has generally been pretty calm, but it's a bit distressing. I was hoping to do the usual 'rc7 is the last rc' release schedule for once (with both 4.8 and 4.9 pushing out to rc8), and I really want things to calm down for that to happen," said Linus Torvalds in today's announcement.
Linux kernel 4.10 could launch on February 12, 2017
That being said, and considering the fact that the development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel series, which was dubbed by Linus Torvalds as "Fearless Coyote," is nearing completion, we can only hope that there will be just one more RC build announced next week, on February 5.
The final release of Linux kernel 4.10 could be shipping on February 12, 2017, but things can change if the RC8 build is to be released. However, it will take a few good weeks, if not even months until it'll arrive in the stable software repositories of our favorite operating systems. Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), which launches on April 13, 2016, could be the first stable OS with Linux 4.10.
Until then, we invite you today to download the Linux kernel 4.10 Release Candidate 6 development version and take it for a test drive. Again, when testing, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release build of Linux kernel 4.10, which means that you shouldn't install it on a production machine, nor replace your stable kernel with it.