14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few minutes ago, December 21, 2015, Linus Torvalds had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the sixth RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 LTS kernel.
According to Mr. Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.4 LTS RC6 is yet another quiet, small and fairly normal development milestone that consists of a little over 60% drivers updates, 16% core networking improvements, 13% hardware architecture fixes, and the rest of 10% is split among filesystems updates, documentation enhancements, header files, and various other under-the-hood improvements.
"Things remain fairly normal. Last week rc5 was very small indeed, this week we have a slightly bigger rc6. The main difference is that rc6 had a network pull in it," said Linus Torvalds. "I'd expect (and hope) that with the holidays next week should continue being quiet. And maybe I can hope that people take the downtime to play with their hardware and test out the most recent kernel version?"
Linux kernel 4.4 LTS Release Candidate 6 is out for testing
If you usually spend your Sunday night testing the latest Release Candidate for the next major Linux kernel release, today should be no different, as you can download the Linux kernel 4.4 LTS RC6 sources right now via Softpedia or from the kernel.org website, fire up your favorite terminal emulator and start compiling the kernel by hand for your architecture.
Please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release piece of software, so we don't recommend installing it over a stable kernel on your production-ready machine(s). The final release of the Linux 4.4 kernel should be out early in 2016, and it will be the next long-term supported branch, which means that it will receive security patches for about two years, until 2018.