Linux 4.10-rc1 Kernel Released As A Christmas Present From Torvalds

The merge window is over and the first release candidate to Linux 4.10 is now available for testing.

Linux 4.10-rc1 brings many changes over Linux 4.9 including atomic mode-setting for Nouveau, support for more ARM platforms, a lot of AMD Ryzen/Zen enablement, and much more. For a complete overview of Linux 4.10 see our extensive and original Linux 4.10 kernel features article.

Linus wrote of the 4.10-rc1 kernel, "On the whole, this wasn't all that big a release - nothing like 4.9. Although it wasn't tiny either. I think 4.7 was smaller. 4.8 might have been too. It's xmas day, and right now I can't be arsed to actually do the statistics I'd normally do. Everything looks pretty normal, although we had an unusual amount of tree-wide final cleanups in the last days of the merge window. But the general statistics look fairly common: a bit over half is drivers, maybe slightly less arch updates than normal, and a fair amount of documentation updates due to the sphinx conversion. And then the usual misc noise all over, although the perf tooling updates do stand out."

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to those celebrating any end-of-year holidays and enjoy this fresh kernel for testing. Stay tuned for our usual Linux benchmarking of the 4.10 development code in the days and weeks ahead. Linux 4.10 should be officially released in February.