14 DAY TRIAL // A day later than usual, here's the sixth Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series, as announced today by Linus Torvalds on the kernel mailing list.
We have to admit that we were a little worried that Linus Torvalds didn't announce the new RC release of Linux 4.12 yesterday, but the only reason for that would be because he's traveling, and so it turned out to be. Linus is currently in Beijing, China, most probably attending the LinuxCon ContainerCon CloudOpen China conference that takes place between June 19-20, 2017.
Linux kernel 4.12 RC6 is a small release, final could launch July 2, 2017
However, Linus Torvalds gives us good news on the progress of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel, saying that the RC6 milestone is again smaller on size, at least compared to last week's Release Candidate, and hopes for Linux 4.12 series to have a normal development cycle with only seven RCs and not eight. This can only mean that we'll be getting it as soon as July 2, 2017.
"OK, so I'm traveling, and the timing of this rc is slightly out of kilter, but it's really just one day off," says Linus Torvalds. "The good news is that rc6 is smaller than rc5 was, and I think we're back on track and rc5 really was big just due to random timing. We'll see. Next weekend when I'm back home and do rc7, I'll see how I feel about things. I'm still hopeful that this would be a normal release cycle where rc7 is the last rc."
Those of you who were following the development of the Linux 4.12 kernel series can now download the sixth Release Candidate right now from our website or from kernel.org and take it for spin to report issues. When testing it, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don't replace your stable kernel with it, nor deploy it on production machines.