Just a few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the great pleasure of announcing that the next LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel branch will be Linux 4.9.
The development cycle of a new Linux kernel branch doesn't take more than a month and a half or a maximum of two months, depending if the respective series will receive seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) milestones, but LTS releases are picked by veteran kernel developers from time to time when older ones reach end of life (EOL).
Currently, the Linux kernel developers are working hard on bringing new features and improvements to the next major series, Linux 4.8, which received its first Release Candidate build last Sunday, August 7. Linux kernel 4.8 should hit stable, production-ready state sometime this fall, most probably at the end of September.
Linux kernel 4.9 LTS to enter development two weeks after Linux 4.8
If Linux kernel 4.8 will be a normal release with a total of seven RCs, and it'll be announced on day of September 25, then the development cycle of the Linux 4.9 kernel should start with the first Release Candidate development snapshot on October 9, 2016. But if Linux kernel 4.8 will have eight RCs, then we should see Linux kernel 4.9 LTS RC1 one week later, on October 16.
Therefore, the final release of Linux kernel 4.9 LTS should hit the streets at the end of November 2016. By then, many GNU/Linux distributions will have new versions, and among the most popular ones we can mention Fedora 25 and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak). Being a long-term supported branch, Linux 4.9 will receive security fixes and updated drivers for a couple of years, compared with normal releases.
