14 DAY TRIAL // The last version of the stable Linux kernel 3.13.11 has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking the end of this particular branch.
The Linux maintainers have decided that this is the end of the road for Linux kernel 3.13.x and the branch has reached end of life. This means that it will no longer receive any updates and users and developers have been asked to switch to a newer version.
The biggest distribution that relies on Linux kernel 3.13.x is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which was just released a week ago. This was to be expected, and the Ubuntu developers will have to pick up the development of this kernel branch.
Predictably, Linux kernel 3.13.11 is not a big release and it comes with only a handful of fixes, driver updates, and smaller changes.
“This is the LAST 3.13.y release. It is now end-of-life. Please move to 3.14.y now. I'm announcing the release of the 3.13.11 kernel. All users of the 3.13 kernel series must upgrade.”
“The updated 3.13.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.13.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary,” Greg Kroah-Hartman said in the email announcement.
According to the changelog, a crash that occurred due to a truncation of csize (jffs2) has been fixed, removing the Long Term Key is now done properly, a hung task on sync (backing_dev) has been fixed, the correct tty name is now used in the “active” sysfs attribute, the timer_irq_works() check is now bypassed, a deadlock with nested trans handles (btrfs) has been fixed, a segmentation fault found in the stress test has been corrected, a directory hash ordering bug has been fixed, and a low latency bug (tty) has been corrected.
If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.13.x branch, you should consider an update to this build, or you can even update to the latest one, 3.14, which is quite an interesting release. Better yet, you should wait until the developers of the distribution you are using make the proper integration of a new kernel.
Linux kernel 3.14 comes with better Intel Broadwell graphics support, various Radeon improvements, Nouveau improvements (support for new GPUs from NVIDIA), quite a few Btrfs changes, and even NVIDIA Tegra PRIME support.
A complete list of commits in this branch of the kernel can be found in the official announcement. You can download the Linux kernel 3.13.11 sources right now from Softpedia.