Linux 4.14-rc1 Released A Day Early

Linus Torvalds has tagged the first release candidate of Linux 4.14 one day early and thereby marking the end of the new feature merge window for this kernel series.

I'll have my Linux 4.14 feature overview out tomorrow while for now you can see my earlier 4.14 change highlights if you are behind in your daily Phoronix reading for the dozens of articles already about the Linux 4.14 kernel.

Linus wrote in the release announcement:

Yes, I realize this is a day early, and yes, I realize that if I had waited until tomorrow, I would also have hit the 26th anniversary of the Linux-0.01 release, but neither of those undeniable facts made me want to wait with closing the merge window.

This has been an "interesting" merge window. It's not actually all that unusual in size - I think it's shaping to be a pretty regular release after 4.13 that was smallish. But unlike 4.13 it also wasn't a completely smooth merge window, and honestly, I _really_ didn't want to wait for any possible straggling pull requests.

Don't get me wrong - things don't look bad, but I hate it when I find issues during the merge window that I feel should have been noticed before the code made it to me, and it happened a few times this release.

Linux 4.14-rc1 is available from the Git code. The stale codename remains "Fearless Coyote".