Linux 4.9-rc8 Kernel Released

There was too much churn in the mainline Linux kernel Git tree that Linus Torvalds today released 4.9-rc8 rather than declaring Linux 4.9 as ready to ship.

Thus Linux 4.9.0 will be officially out next weekend with having an extra week for testing to happen and any other last-minute regression fixes. Of the changes for 4.9-rc8, Linus commented, "Extra kudos to Arnd, who actually root-caused the incredibly annoying 'modversions do not work with new versions of binutils', bisecting it to a particular change to symbol handling in binutils, and then adding a small one-liner patch to the kernel to work around the issue. We already had other workarounds in place, but it's always good to know exactly what in the tool chain changed to cause things like this."

There were also 163 other small fixes this week. More details via the kernel mailing list.