14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds on Sunday announced the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel series, which will be used by default on Ubuntu 17.10.
The development of Linux Kernel 4.13 is on track, and the RC4 release is here one week after the RC3 one to bring another batch of updates and improvements to supported drivers and components. However, it would appear that RC4 is a bit bigger than usual at this stage, but there's nothing to worry about because it includes some big networking changes that should have been added in RC3.
"So RC3 was smaller than usual, and now RC4 is a bit bigger than usual. However, it's not outrageously so, and the reason for it all is fairly clear: the networking pull just missed RC3, so it's all in RC4 instead," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "That, along with the media pull, accounts for the bulk of the changes."
Media and networking changes, AMDGPU updates
Apart from the big networking pull, the fourth Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.13 also ships with some important media changes to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files, various updates to the AMDGPU graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs, improvements to the EXT4 file system, some scai fixes, as well as a bunch of enhancements to supported architectures.
You should check out the appended shortlog in Linus Torvalds' mailing list announcement of you're curious to know what exactly was changed in Linux kernel 4.13 RC4, whose source tarball you can download right now from kernel.org or via our web portal if you want to go out and test it. The fifth Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.13 is expected on August 13, 2017.