It appears that the Linux 4.9 kernel branch will be a big one, which means that it could receive eight Release Candidate builds during its entire development cycle, which might come to an end in the first week of December. Therefore, Linux kernel 4.9 may launch on December 11, 2016. There will be a bunch of interesting and useful features implemented in Linux kernel 4.9, starting with Andy Lutomirski’s new virtually mapped kernel stack allocations for finding and recovering from stack overflows much easier. There will be some VFS and uaccess cleanups as well, also thanks to Andy Lutomirski.