Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate of Linux 4.9 kernel. The new release surfaces from a “big” merge window that went opened following the launch of the 4.8 kernel earlier this month.
Torvalds considers that Linux 4.9 “looks to be a big release” for the open source world. But some bugs from the past emerged amidst the merge window.
“I ended up stopping doing pulls twice during the merge window just because I was chasing down some random problem. That tends to turn my busy merge window time from ‘busy’ to ‘somewhat stressful’,” Torvalds writes in a community email.
First things first. Linux 4.9 release candidate (RC1) comes with virtually mapped kernel stack allocations to breeze the search and recovery operations from stack overflows. The release additionally cleans up some existing code from Linux kernel and comes with a specific kernel stack mapping cache. Also, there are some improvements for virtual file system and unaccess cleanups.
Torvalds has created a mergelog to list all the changes under Linux 4.9 RC1. Developers and enthusiasts can visit the official kernel.org website to download the latest candidate on their system.
Over 1,500 people were involved in developing the RC1 build. However, it is likely to have various bugs to spoil things on your system.
