A message from Linus Torvalds - the person behind the Linux kernel - announced that version 4.7 of the software has left release candidacy and has finally been released. The kernel has been in development since May of this year, and since then has had seven release candidates in the lead up to the final version.

The email from Linus detailed that the release was slightly delayed due to his travels, and gave special emphasis to fixes for Intel's Kaby Lake GPU. Other significant changes in version 4.7 are support for AMD's RX480 GPU, improvements for USB/IP, EFI "Capsule" firmware updates, as well as a new security module called "LoadPin" that makes sure all kernel modules are loaded from the same filesystem.

So, after a slight delay due to my travels, I'm back, and 4.7 is out. Despite it being two weeks since rc7, the final patch wasn't all that big, and much of it is trivial one- and few-liners. There's a couple of network drivers that got a bit more loving. Appended is the shortlog since rc7 for people who care: it's fairly spread out, with networking and some intel Kabylake GPU fixes being the most noticeable ones. But there's random small noise spread all over. And obviously, this means that the merge window for 4.8 is open.Judging by the linux-next contents, that's going to be a bigger release than the current one (4.7 really was fairly calm, I blame at least partly summer in the northern hemisphere). Linus

You can download the latest kernel here and a more comprehensive, easy to read changelog for Linux 4.7 is available here.