Linux 4.14-rc2 is now ready for public testing

Sep 25, 2017 21:56 GMT  ·  By

Development of the Linux 4.14 kernel series continues with the second Release Candidate (RC) milestone, which Linus Torvalds himself announced this past weekend. The update brings more updated drivers and various improvements.

Linus Torvalds kicked off the development of Linux kernel 4.14 last week when he announced the first Release Candidate, and now the second RC is available packed full of goodies. These include updated networking, GPU, and RDMA drivers, improvements to the x86, ARM, PowerPC, PA-RISC, MIPS, and s390 hardware architectures, various core networking, filesystem, and documentation changes.

"This was a fairly usual rc2, with a very quiet beginning of the week," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "The only unusual thing worth noting here is that the security subsystem pull request that came in during the merge window got rejected due to problems, and so RC2 ends up with most of that security pull having been merged in independent pieces instead."

Third RC coming October 1, final release expected early November

The development cycle of the Linux 4.14 kernel series, which will be the next LTS (Long Term Support) version, will continue next Sunday, October 1, with the third Release Candidate. If you're curious to see what exactly has been changed in this update, you should check out the appended shortlog that's been attached by Linus Torvalds' on his announcement.

The final release of Linux kernel 4.14 LTS is expected to land early- or mid-November, either on the 5th or the 12th, depending on whether there are seven or eight Release Candidates, respectively. In the meantime, you can download the Linux kernel 4.14 RC2 source tarball from kernel.org or via our website if you want to take this milestone for a test drive, but keep in mind not to use it on a production machine.