14 DAY TRIAL // The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.14.4, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, and it features a moderate number of changes and improvements.
The previous version released for this Linux kernel was rather large and it was also the biggest update since the promotion of this branch to stable. The version launched today is not as big as the last one, but it's still something to look for.
This build of Linux kernel, 3.14.4, seems to comprise various driver updates and fixes, but there are also a number of Arch updates and various other changes.
“I'm announcing the release of the 3.14.4 kernel. All users of the 3.14 kernel series must upgrade.”
“The updated 3.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.14.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 developers, "MSI Revert to Single Message" mode must not be enforced, the handling of the GPIO invert bit has been fixed, a KVM hang with CONFIG_KVM_XICS=n has been fixed, a typo issue for 'clk' has been corrected, a NULL dereference in nuc900_nand_enable() has been corrected, tag ordered controllers have been accommodated, irq for dummy port is no longer requested (ahci), setting affinity on uninitialized vq is now skipped, AP_VLAN interfaces are now excluded from the tx power calculation, and power management support (cirrus) has been added.
Also, a stack protector Makefile breakage with 32-bit userland has been fixed, off-by-one errors in total_tries refactor have been fixed, a potential use-after-free problem has been fixed, a suspend vs. authentication race (mac80211) has been corrected, the trim blacklist for M5x0 drives has been updated, SEI usage on old FW levels has been fixed, and incorrect SG list handling has been fixed.
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, as that particular branch is now End of Life. It's also possible to use the latest Linux kernel 3.15 RC, if you really feel adventurous.
Linux kernel 3.14 features, among other things, 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 Linux kernel 3.14.4 right now from Softpedia.