14 DAY TRIAL // It's still Sunday in the US, so Linus Torvalds has just made his weekly announcement about the release and immediate availability for download and testing of a new RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel.
According to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.5 RC2 is a pretty big one, at least when compared with last week's first Release Candidate build, and it includes architecture and driver updates, some fixes for the Btrfs file system, perf improvements, as well as the new virtio self-tests. Other than that, small improvements here and there, but you should check the appended shortlog for technical details.
"As late as Friday, I was planning on talking about how nice it is to see this new trend of tiny rc2 releases, because there really hadn't been very many pull requests at all," said Linus Torvalds in today's announcement. "But it turns out the pull requests were just heavily skewed to the end of the week, and 4.5-rc2 isn't particularly small after all. It pretty much doubled over the weekend."
Linux 4.5-rc2 now ready for testing
If you're one of those hardcore geeks that like to spend Sunday nights testing the latest Release Candidate build of the upcoming kernel branch, we would like to inform you that Linux kernel 4.5 RC2 is now ready for testing. You can thus grab it right now from the kernel.org website or via Softpedia, whichever suits you best.
Just please try to keep in mind that RC builds are pre-release versions, which means that you should not install them on your production-ready machine or replace a stable kernel package with them. By the looks of it, the final release of Linux kernel 4.5 should see the light of day sometime in March 2016.