Linux Kernel 4.8 Could Land October 2 as Linus Torvalds Announces the Seventh RC

According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate 7 is once again bigger in patches than he was expected. Last week, we reported that things are calming down and that this series will be a normal one with seven RCs, but it now looks like it won’t happen, and there should be one more RC released next week, September 25, 2016. As for the changes included in the RC7 build of Linux kernel 4.8, we can notice various core networking fixes, the usual driver updates (this time for things like PCMCIA, NVMe, and RDMA), a bunch of improvements to some of the supported hardware architectures, as well as some KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and perf fixes, along with the standard core kernel enhancements.