According to Mr. Torvalds, who deliberately released the new Release Candidate version a day early than expected (again), the Linux kernel 4.9 RC4 release appeared to have already been big enough, which is due to the fact that there are a bunch of updated drivers, lots of networking fixes, as well as improvements for filesystems that triggered the bug in the new virtually mapped stacks. The fourth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel series, which could be the next LTS (Long Term Support) branch, also includes various media and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) updates, architecture updates for x86, SPARC, MIPS, and PA-RISC, along with minor core networking and core kernel changes.