Another Sunday, another Release Candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel is out for testing, as announced by Linus Torvalds himself a few hours ago, June 26, 2016.
According to Linus Torvalds, things appear to have calm down lately, and Linux kernel 4.7 Release Candidate 5 is a fairly normal milestone that consists of approximately 50% updated drivers, in particular GPU updates, but also various improvements to some hardware architectures, including PowerPC (PPC), x86, and ARM64 (AArch64).
Of course, there are also the usual patches to fix various issues for some of the supported filesystems, as well as for things like scheduler, mm, a few sound drivers, general-purpose input/output (GPIO), Xen, hwmon, as well as RDMA (remote direct memory access).
"I think things are calming down, although, with almost two-thirds of the commits coming in since Friday morning, it doesn't feel that way - my Fridays end up feeling very busy. But looking at the numbers, we're pretty much where we normally are at this time of the RC series," said Linus Torvalds in the announcement.
Linux kernel 4.7 lands mid-July
If the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.7 advances at this speed and nothing out of the ordinary pop-ups from nowhere, Linus Torvalds will most probably announce two more RC (Release Candidate) builds, and the last one will be out on July 10. Then, the final release of Linux kernel 4.7 should hit the streets on July 17, 2016.
If not, and there's need for an eight Release Candidate, which rarely happens these days, Linux kernel 4.7 will be out one week later, on July 24. Until then, your help is needed to test this fifth RC build of Linux kernel 4.7, which you can download right now via our website or directly from kernel.org.
