According to Linus Torvalds, work on Linux kernel 4.9 is almost finished, and while things have not been so bad during its entire development cycle, the need for an eighth Release Candidate was imperative for ensuring everything is well-tested and polished before the Linux 4.9 kernel series is being promoted to the stable channel. Linux kernel 4.9 Release Candidate 8 (RC8) is here to patch the annoying “modversions do not work with new versions of binutils” issue, which represents a total of 163 small fixes implemented in this development version, but there are also networking fixes for error path leaks, updated drivers, and other small core kernel, filesystems, and VM improvements.