Linux 4.9-rc1 Kernel Released Early

Linus Torvalds decided to release the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel today as opposed to tomorrow (Sunday) to fend off any subsystem maintainers from submitting last minute feature pull requests.

Torvalds wrote this afternoon, "To be fair, the reason I did it a day early this time around is less to stop people from trying to time their pull requests, and mostly because this has been a pretty big merge window, and not hugely enjoyable. I ended up stopping doing pulls twice during the merge window just because I was chasing down some random problem. That tends to turn my busy merge window time from "busy" to "somewhat stressful". But hey, it's all good now, and while 4.9 looks to be a big release and we had a couple of hiccups, on the whole things look normal. The big new thing is the greybus addition, which Greg swears is actually getting used. But the bulk of the changes by far is actually a lot of small details under the hood, as usual."

Torvalds mentioned his own favorite "small detail under the hood" is the virtually mapped kernel stack allocations. You can read the 4.9-rc1 kernel release announcement via the kernel mailing list.

With being caught off guard myself about 4.9-rc1 being a day early, my feature overview of Linux 4.9 isn't out yet but will be on Sunday morning... For now you can see my dozens of short articles about Linux 4.9 changes for those behind on their Phoronix reading.