Linus Torvalds Kicks Off Development of Linux Kernel 4.13 with the First RC

The merge window was opened during the past two weeks, since the launch of the Linux 4.12 kernel, which is now stable and ready for deployment, so Linus Torvalds decided to close it a day early to avoid late pull requests and push the first Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.13 out the door for public testing, which seems to be quite huge, but it’s normal for this stage. Linux kernel 4.13 RC1 saw a lot of work done to improve support for AMD Radeon GPUs, but it also comes with numerous updated drivers, and the usual performance improvements for various hardware architectures, the networking stack, tooling, and other core kernel changes. Documentation updates are also present in a continues effort to clean things up and regularize them in the Linux kernel.