A few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds released the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel, which is now available for download and testing from the usual places.

According to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.4 Release Candidate 2 is another "fairly" normal release that has no huge changes. Among the new features, we can mention support for PA-RISC Huge Page, along with various patches for the slub bulk allocator.

Linux kernel 4.4 RC2 comprises of approximately 70% drivers, especially for things like GPU and network, 12% architecture updates (mostly for s390 and PA-RISC), 8% networking improvements, and 10% mm and perf tooling changes, as well as filesystem updates.

"Things are looking fairly normal in 4.4-land, with no huge surprises in rc2. There were a couple of late features: parisc hugepage support and some late slub bulk allocator patches were not only merged at the end of the week, but they strictly speaking should have been merge window things.," said Linus Torvalds.

Get Linux kernel 4.4 Release Candidate 2 right here

If you're one of the courageous GNU/Linux users who like to run bleeding-edge software on their computers, or if you're a distribution maintainer who wants to test the latest Linux kernel development release, you can download the Linux kernel 4.4 Release Candidate 2 sources right now from the kernel.org website or via Softpedia and start compiling it by hand.

As usual, you should keep in mind the fact that this is a pre-release version, which means that it contains unresolved issues and incomplete functionality. For this reason alone, we strongly don't recommend users installing Linux kernel 4.4 RC2 on stable, production-ready machines where stability is of the essence, except if you know exactly what you are doing.