Linux 4.19-rc1 is now ready for public testing

Aug 26, 2018 21:57 GMT  ·  By

Linus Torvalds has officially kicked off the development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel series today by releasing the first Release Candidate (RC).

It's been two weeks since the Linux 4.18 kernel series was launched, so the merge window for the next major release, Linux kernel 4.19, is now officially closed as Linus Torvalds announces today the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) for public testing.

"So two weeks have passed, and the merge window for 4.19 is over. This was a fairly frustrating merge window, partly because 4.19 looks to be a pretty big release (no single reason), and partly just due to random noise," said Linus Torvalds.

Even if the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.19 just kicked off, it does shape up to be a big release, but not the biggest ever, according to Linus Torvalds. And that's mainly because of the patches for the L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) a.k.a. Foreshadow vulnerabilities.

But Linux kernel 4.19 will bring a lot of other changes, including updated drivers, mostly for graphics and networking, architecture updates, core kernel and networking improvements, updated filesystems, as well as documentation and tooling updates.

Linux kernel 4.19 could arrive in mid-October 2018

By our calculations, the Linux 4.19 kernel series could hit the streets sometime in mid-October 2018, either on the 14th or the 21st, which will depend on how many Release Candidate (RC) milestones are going to be published, something that only Linus Torvalds decides.

Until then, if you want to help test the Linux 4.19 kernel, you can go ahead and download the first Release Candidate tarball right now from kernel.org or via our Linux software portal, compile it for your favorite architecture, and install it on your Linux box.

However, we have to warn you that this is an early development release, which might contain bugs and other issues, so don't deploy it on production machines, nor replace your stable kernel with it. Upcoming Release Candidates will be available for public testing every Sunday until the final release in mid-October 2018.

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