14 DAY TRIAL // A day later than expected, the fourth RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.14 LTS kernel series has been announced earlier today by Linus Torvalds, who gives us an insight into the development cycle.
According to Linus Torvalds, things are starting calming down for the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.14, which will be the next long-term support (LTS) release, and while today's RC4 milestone is bigger than a Release Candidate should be at this stage, it's still fairly normal, with the exception of a large watchdog merge.
"In particular, ignoring that core watchdog thing, it's the usual "mostly drivers and Arch updates". This time most of the arch updates (by far) are ARM, and the drivers are dominated by networking, but there's other stuff in there too (USB, MMC, HID..). And then the usual random stuff elsewhere," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement.
Linux kernel 4.14 LTS expected to launch early November
If things are going well with the next Release Candidate, which should be out by the end of the week, Linus Torvalds is confident that Linux kernel 4.14 LTS will launch early November, on the 5th. However, if the RC5 snapshot turns out to be bigger than expected, we're looking at mid-November as the final release date.
Until then, there are still a few more weeks of testing, and you can help by downloading the Linux kernel 4.14 LTS Release Candidate 5 right now from kernel.org or via our website, compile and install it on your machine(s), and report bugs or issues with your hardware if you encounter any. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release build, so do not replace your stable kernel with it, nor deploy it on any production system.