14 DAY TRIAL // A few minutes ago, on December 7, Mr. Linus Torvalds, father of Linux kernel, had the great pleasure of unleashing the fourth RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel.
Linux kernel 4.4 RC4 is now available for download from the usual places (see the download links at the end of the article), and according to Mr. Torvalds, things are still calm and there's nothing that stands out. In numbers, the fourth Release Candidate version of the Linux 4.4 kernel consists of approximately 70% driver updates, especially for things like GPU, SCSI, sound, and networking, 15% networking updates, and 15% is split between core improvements, architecture updates, and others.
"Another week, another rc. We had a few more commits than last week (mostly due to the networking fixes merge), but on the whole it's been pretty calm," said Linus Torvalds. "Everything looks fairly normal: about 70% drivers - network drivers, gpu, sound, scsi dominate. On top of that we have 15% core networking, and the rest is split between Arch updates and "misc" stuff all over (including some vfs and core kernel fixes)."
Linux kernel 4.4 RC4 is available for testing now
As usual, if you're interested in a long night testing session of the latest Release Candidate build of Linux kernel 4.4 LTS, you can download the Linux kernel 4.4 RC4 sources right now via our website or from the kernel.org and start compiling it by hand on your GNU/Linux distribution.
Please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version of the final Linux kernel 4.4 release, which means that it is not stable enough for use in production environments where stability is of the essence. Please do not install it on your stable GNU/Linux operating system because it might not work as expected.