Just a few moments ago, Linus Torvalds had the great pleasure of announcing the start of the Linux kernel 4.4 development cycle with the immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build.
According to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.4 Release Candidate 1 looks very normal at this stage of development and includes numerous updated drivers, especially for things like GPU and networking, some improvements to the ARM, PowerPC (PPC), MIPS, x86, s390, and Chris hardware architectures. Moreover there and many other small under-the-hood enhancements and minor changes, while multiple bugs have been fixed as well in this release.
"So it's Sunday, two weeks has passed, and so 4.4-rc1 is out there and the merge window is closed," said Linus Torvalds. "Just looking at the patch itself, things look fairly normal at a high level, possibly a bit more driver-heavy than usual with about 75% of the patch being drivers, and 10% being architecture updates. The remaining 15% is documentation, filesystem, core networking (as opposed to network drivers), tooling and some core infrastructure."
As mentioned, the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.4 has just started with this first Release Candidate build, so we should expect to see at least seven RCs during the next few months, as they are being released by Linus Torvalds every Sunday evening. Of course, this means that the final release of Linux kernel 4.4 is expected sometime next year.
Linux kernel 4.4 RC1 now available for testing
Courageous Linux users, distribution maintainers, and anyone else who wants to take the first Release Candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel for a test drive can download the Linux kernel 4.4 RC1 sources right now via Softpedia or directly from the kernel.org website and start compiling it by hand.
As expected, this is a pre-release version of the Linux 4.4 kernel, which means that it includes a number of unresolved issues that will be patched during the entire development cycle. We don't recommend users to install this kernel on their GNU/Linux operating system.
