A day early than expected, Linux creator Linus Torvalds cautiously kicked off the development of the Linux 4.14 kernel series, which looks to be the next LTS (Long Term Support) branch, with the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone.
That’s right, two weeks after the release of Linux kernel 4.13, which is currently the most stable and advanced kernel series, being adopted by more and more GNU/Linux distributions each day, the first RC development snapshot of Linux kernel 4.14 is ready for public testing, officially closing the merge window. And it looks like some core new functionality will be implemented in this release.
“Things don’t look bad, but I hate it when I find issues during the merge window,” said Linus Torvalds. “Admittedly, some of it was simply because we had some unusual activity. For example, on the x86 VM side, 4.14 doesn’t just have _one_ new core memory management feature, but three: 5-level page tables, ASID support and the AMD memory encryption support.”