Users can download this new build from Softpedia

Sep 21, 2014 19:53 GMT  ·  By

The latest version of the Linux kernel, 3.16.3, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman and is now the most advanced stable build out there.

Linux kernel 3.16.x is a relatively new release, but it has already been adopted by a number of Linux distributions and it's available in the repositories for many others. The third release in the series is a little bigger than the previous one, but not by much. In any case, it's going to be an interesting update.

Even if the first update for this branch has been rather small, the development seems to have picked up a little and more changes and improvements have been made in the meantime.

What the devs are saying about it

“I'm announcing the release of the 3.16.3 kernel. All users of the 3.16 kernel series must upgrade.”

“The updated 3.16.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.16.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 says in the email announcement.

According to the changelog, ACPI ID for Intel Braswell has been added, packet2 is now used for nop on hawaii with old firmware, a bug which could cause incorrect system call restarts has been fixed, devices using RMRRs from IOMMU API domains have been excluded, the ADI AXI SPDIF specification has been fixed, a break placement has been corrected, a read barrier is now used when creating real_pte, a write barrier has been added after updating the valid bit, a deadlock between host removal and multipathd has been fixed, and an undefined bit shift on big-endian architectures with 32-bit DMA address has been fixed.

Also, optimistic spinning for s390/locking has been re-enabled, null terminate objects detached from a namespace node is now done correctly, undefined caps from all processes have been removed, the DCDC4 linear voltage range has been fixed, and the sequential scan has been restricted to 256 LUNs.

If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.16.x branch or the ones in the 3.15 kernel, you should consider an update to this build.

Linux Kernel 3.16 will most likely get quite a few updates before it gets retired, but it's unclear whether this version will eventually become an LTS release or if it will declare EOL really fast.

A complete list of commits in this branch of the kernel can be found in the official announcement. You can download Linux kernel 3.16.3 right now from Softpedia. Keep in mind that this is the source package and that you will have to compile it yourself.