Linus Announces Linux 4.8

Linus Torvalds announced a new version of the Linux kernel with many notable new features. The two most interesting features of the Linux 4.8 release are support for Microsoft's Surface 3 touchscreen and the Raspberry Pi 3's SoC (system on chip).

Ubuntu 16.10, which is slated to be release in October, will be the first major desktop Linux distribution to use the 4.8 kernel.

However not everything went as smoothly as expected. Torvalds noticed a nasty bug that slipped into the final release. He wrote on the mailing list: “I'm really sorry I applied that last series from Andrew just before doing the 4.8 release, because they cause problems, and now it is in 4.8 (and that buggy crap is marked for stable too). In particular, I just got this “Kernel BUG at ./include/linux/swap.h:276” and the end result was a dead kernel.”

Torvalds is not particularly happy about it and wrote that “Yes, I'm grumpy. This went in very late in the release candidates, and I had higher expectations of things coming in through Andrew. Adding random BUG_ON()s to code that clearly hasn't had sufficient testing is *not* acceptable, and it's definitely not acceptable to send that to me after rc8 unless it has gotten a *lot* of testing, which it clearly must not have had. Adding stable to the cc too to warn about this.”

Torvalds’ advice to seasoned kernel developer Andrew Morton is to stop taking those kinds of patches!