All users of the 3.18 kernel series are urged to update

Jun 15, 2015 04:28 GMT  ·  By

After having released a buggy Linux kernel 3.18.15 LTS version, Sasha Levin announced on June 15 the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.18.16 LTS (Long Term Support).

Linux kernel 3.18.16 LTS is a huge release and the changelog is overwhelming, but few of you know that it was released a few hours after version 3.18.15, in order to fix a compilation issue with older GCC compilers, as well as a data corruption issue with RAID0. Therefore, users are urged to skip Linux kernel 3.18.15 and update to Linux kernel 3.18.16 as soon as possible.

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.18.16 kernel," says Sasha Levin. "Note the 3.18.15 kernel was pushed earlier today but never announced and been superseded by 3.18.16 to fix a build with older GCC compilers and to fix a data corruption on RAID0. All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade."

Looking at the changelog, we can notice that Linux kernel 3.18.16 LTS brings a significant number of improvements to the ARM and x86 architectures, but also to Arc, s390, PowerPC, PA-RISC, and ARM64. It patches issues in the EXT4, NFS, JBD2, OCFS2, OMFS, XFS, and NILFS2 filesystems and brings many networking and sound updates.

Numerous drivers have been updated in Linux kernel 3.18.16 LTS

As usual, numerous drivers have been updated, this time for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), ATA, EDAC, GPIO (general-purpose input/output), DRM (mostly Radeon), hwmon, iiO, InfiniBand, MD, MMC, Wireless, PINCTRL, SCSI, Staging, Target, Thermal, TTY, USB, and Xen devices.

All users of the 3.18 kernel series are urged to update to the 3.18.16 release as soon as the packages are made available in the default software repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distributions. Download Linux kernel 3.18.16 LTS right now via Softpedia or from the kernel.org website.