All users from the Linux 3.12 series must update immediately

Jan 13, 2016 22:40 GMT  ·  By

After being released for download at the end of last week, the long-term supported Linux 3.12.52 kernel was officially announced by its maintainer, Jiri Slaby, on January 11, 2016.

Therefore, we would like to inform our GNU/Linux readers about some of the changes implemented in Linux kernel 3.12.52 LTS, as according to the appended diff from the previous maintenance release, Linux kernel 3.12.51 LTS, the new version modifies a total of 108 files with 933 insertions and 328 deletions.

Looking at the changelog, we can notice that Linux kernel 3.12.52 LTS comes with numerous core networking improvements, mostly for the IPv6 network protocol, but also for the IPv4 one. There are, however, fixes for other networking things, such as Bluetooth, Layer Two Tunneling Protocol (L2TP), mac80211, SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP), and DECnet.

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.12.52 kernel. All users of the 3.12 kernel series must upgrade," said Jiri Slaby. "The updated 3.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.12.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."

x86, MIPS and ARM fixes, lots of updated drivers

In addition to the core networking improvements, Linux kernel 3.12.52 LTS fixes some issues for the x86, MIPS, ARM and ARM64 hardware architectures, as well as for the Btrfs, EXT4, JBD2, NFS (Network File System) and Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS2) file systems. The sound infrastructure has been updated as well in this new maintenance release from the Linux 3.12 LTS series.

Lastly, there are numerous driver updates in Linux kernel 3.12.52 LTS, especially for things like Bluetooth, Devfreq, FireWire, general-purpose input/output (GPIO), I2C, HID, USB, and networking, mostly Ethernet, but also Wireless, Phy, PPP and USB. If you haven't upgraded yet, you can download Linux kernel 3.12.52 LTS right now via Softpedia or from the kernel.org website.