Linus Torvalds has announced that the final build of Linux 4.10 has been delayed by a week’s time. The new kernel was originally expected to be scheduled for the third week of February.
Instead of moving with the schedule and releasing the final kernel update, Torvalds has brought a new release candidate (RC) of the 4.10 kernel. There was a list of last-minute regression fixes that needed to be integrated and tested via another RC release. Thus, the community has received the RC8 just a week after the debut of RC7, which was supposed to be the last RC.
“It has not been all that busy, although we did have a number of small last-minute regression fixes (some just reverting stuff that caused problems and needed more thought, other fixing things). But nothing out of the ordinary, and I would not have felt bad about just doing the final release today,” writes Torvalds in a mailing list announcement.
Torvalds has travel plans starting from next week. Hence, he took a tactical call and planned RC8 before the final release to avoid the merge window during his tour. The final release of Linux kernel 4.10 is now scheduled for February 19.
Handful of changes ahead of final release
As the last RC build of Linux kernel 4.10, the RC8 has a small change log. The new build brings some driver updates, few overlooked changes to x86, ARM and PowerPC architecture, networking and filesystem fixes. Likewise, there are certain changes to other things like docs, perf tooling, misc and header files.
You can download the latest RC build from kernel.org to experience the changes. Alternatively, you can wait for few more days to at last have the final Linux 4.10 on your system.
[…] Comes after eight release candidates, Linux kernel 4.10 is a result of nearly 13,000 commits that the Linux community received by its members all around the world. This is the reason Torvalds considers it as a “fairly average release” and not as small as it was initially seemed to be. […]