Linus Torvalds, creator and maintainer of the Linux kernel, has officially released Linux 4.16 – and, despite the announcement taking place on April Fool’s Day, it’s no joke.

“So the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7 [release candidate 7], in that about half of it is networking. If it wasn’t for that, it would all be very small and calm,” wrote Torvalds in the release announcement this weekend. “We had a number of fixes and cleanups elsewhere, but none of it made me go ‘uhhuh, better let this soak for another week.’ And davem [David S. Miller] didn’t think the networking was a reason to delay the release, so I’m not.”

The timely release of Linux 4.16 stands in contrast to the somewhat hairy development process for its predecessor, which was delayed at the last minute following the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities and the issues surrounding their patches as well as a boot bug found by Laura Abbott.

Aside from the networking fixes and improvements, the key changes in the new release for embedded developers centre around minor fixes for the 32-bit and 64-bit Arm architectures, plus fixes for the RISC-V port introduced in Linux 4.15 including initial function trace (ftrace) support. The Linux 4.16 kernel can be downloaded from Kernel.org now.