Today, October 2, 2016, Linus Torvalds proudly announced the release and availability for download of the Linux 4.8 kernel branch, which is now the latest stable and most advanced one.

Linux kernel 4.8 has been in development for the past two months, during which it received no less than eight Release Candidate (RC) testing versions that early adopters were able to compile and install on their GNU/Linux operating system to test various hardware components or simply report bugs. That's right, the Linux 4.8 kernel series was one of those special ones that received the eighth Release Candidate.

A lot of things have been fixed since last week's RC8 milestone, among which we can mention lots of updated drivers, in particular for GPU, networking, and Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMM), a bunch of improvements to the ARM, MIPS, SPARC, and x86 hardware architectures, updates to the networking stack and a few filesystems, as well as some minor changes to cgroup and vm.

"This obviously means that the merge window for 4.9 is open, and I appreciate the people who already sent in some pull requests early due to upcoming travel or other reasons," says Linus Torvalds in today's announcement. "I'll start pulling things tomorrow, and have even the most eager developers and testers hopefully test the final 4.8 release before the next development kernels start coming."

Linux kernel 4.8 coming soon to a distro near you

There are several interesting new features implemented in the Linux 4.8 kernel, and Microsoft Surface 3 touchscreen support is one that should get a mention. As with any new kernel series, there's better support for new hardware devices, so if you have a recent machine, you need to use Linux kernel 4.8, which is coming soon to a distro near you.

In the meantime, we urge OS vendors to download the Linux kernel 4.8 sources right now from the kernel.org website or via ours and compile them for their GNU/Linux operating systems. Rolling releases like Solus, Arch Linux, and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed should be the first stable distros to get the Linux 4.8 kernel packages, which is now tagged as the mainline kernel. Ubuntu 16.10 is launching on October 13 with Linux kernel 4.8.