作者: roeta
2016-02-29 12:01:42
Yes, it happened again, Linus Torvalds has made yet another early Sunday announcement for the next RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel branch.
We were expecting to see the Linux kernel 4.5 Release Candidate 6 build later tonight, February 28, 2016, but it looks like we are lucky again to get it for a spin a bit earlier, that, of course, in case you have nothing else better to do Sunday afternoon.
According to Mr. Torvalds, the sixth Release Candidate (RC) build of Linux kernel 4.5 consists of a big patch to one of the network driver header files, which is approximately 40 percent of the entire changes for this release. The rest are mostly updated drivers, in particular for networking, USB, GPU, sound, and ACPI.
But there are also the usual architecture updates, especially for the ARM, x86, and ARC hardware architectures, various core networking improvements, minor perf changes, as well as several fixes to the NFS, VFS, and DAX filesystems.
"I wish rc6 was smaller, but at the same time I'm just relieved that Kirill found and fixed the problem with the THP cleanup series that had plagued us this release cycle." said Linus Torvalds in the announcement. "I'd like to say that things are on track for the usual release timing, but let's see how things look next week."
Linux kernel 4.5 launches March 2016
By the looks of it, Linux kernel 4.5 will be successfully launched this March, most probably in about two or three weeks from today, depending if Linus Torvalds decided to do the usual seven RC builds, or release the eighth too.
So the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.5 will continue next week with the RC7 build, and if everything goes well, the final release should be available worldwide on March 13, 2016. If not, it will be released on March 20.
Either way, you can now test the sixth Release Candidate version by downloading the sources right now from the
kernel.org website, or via
Softpedia. Please do not replace your stable kernel with this pre-release version!