Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 4.9-rc8, released on December 4. Quoth Linus:
"
So if anybody has been following the git tree, it should come as no surprise that I ended up doing an rc8 after all: things haven't been bad, but it also hasn't been the complete quiet that would have made me go 'no point in doing another week'."
The December 4 regressions report shows eleven known problems in the 4.9 kernel.
Stable updates: 4.8.12 and 4.4.36 were released on December 2. The 4.8.13 and 4.4.37 updates are in the review process as of this writing; they can be expected on or after December 9.
Those looking for a fix for the easily
exploitable race condition known as CVE-2016-8655 will have to wait a
bit longer. The
fix is in 4.9, but has not yet found its way into the stable update
stream.