Linux 4.6-rc2 is now available for public testing

Apr 3, 2016 17:00 GMT  ·  By

It's Sunday, so Linus Torvalds has just announced the general availability for testing of yet another RC (Release Candidate) build towards the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel.

Linus Torvalds usually makes this type of announcements Sunday evening, very late, sometimes even close to or after midnight, but it looks like he changed his habits and this is the second time we get to download a new Release Candidate (RC) build of the next major kernel version early in the morning.

And it's a good thing after all, because we have a lot more time on our hands to thoroughly test the new milestone, though many people return from their weekend escapades in the evening. However, don't expect anything out of the ordinary, because this is yet another fairly normal release, at least according to Mr. Torvalds.

"You all know the drill by now - another week, another rc. I'd say that things look fairly normal at this point: it's not a big rc2, but that's been true lately (rc3 tends to be a bit bigger - probably just because it takes time for people to start noticing issues)," said Linus Torvalds in the announcement.

What's new in Linux kernel 4.6 Release Candidate 2

As said before, Linux kernel 4.6 Release Candidate 2 is a small milestone, and it looks like half of the changes are driver updates, a quarter consists of various bug fixes to several hardware architectures, and the rest is split between networking stack improvements, documentation updates, as well as core kernel fixes.

There are, of course, the usual filesystems and mm improvements too. If you have nothing else better to do this Sunday, you can download the Linux kernel 4.6 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) sources right now from the kernel.org website or via Softpedia, and take it for a test drive. But remember, don't install it on your production machine!