It’s alive!
With one simple commit, the Release Candidate flag is removed and the 4.0 kernel is officially released. Unfortunately, there isn’t much spectacle in this release.
Feature-wise, 4.0 doesn’t have all that much special. Much have been
made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically,
that not only wasn’t the reason for the version number change, we’ve
had much bigger changes in other versions. So this is very much a
“solid code progress” release.
One interesting part is the decision to name this a 4.0 release. Then again, if you remember PHP6, version numbers really are just numbers, nothing special.
There is also a hint to a bigger release in 4.1 in the announcement.
[…] But we’ve definitely had bigger releases (and
judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones).
Give us a few years, and we’ll be rocking the 4.0+ kernel in a modern Linux Distro. ;-)