That’s right, Linus Torvalds just announced the second Release Candidate for Linux kernel 4.9, which lands eight days after the first one and appears to be fairly normal development snapshot that includes lots of updated drivers, mostly for GPU, but also HID, SCSI, MMC, PINCTRL, IMPI, and clocksource, various x86 and ARM64 architecture updates, improvemnts to the EXT4, F2FS, Ceph, and NFS filesystems, and some VM cleanups. The development cycle of the Linux 4.9 kernel branch just started, but it looks like it might just be one of those big releases that receive eight Release Candidate snapshots instead of seven, which means that the final release should hit the streets in the second week of December, on the 11th. But if things turn out differently, it could be released on December 4, 2016.