All users of the Linux 3.12 LTS kernel series must upgrade

Mar 11, 2016 02:33 GMT  ·  By

Yesterday we reported news on the release of Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS and Linux kernel 3.10.100 LTS, but today we would like to inform our readers about the availability of Linux kernel 3.12.56 LTS.

The Linux 3.12 kernel branch is a long-term supported one and will receive security patches and bugfixes for a couple more years than the normal kernels, and the fifty-sixth maintenance release is here to make sure that the LTS branch remains stable and reliable at all times.

According to the diff from Linux kernel 3.12.55 LTS, the new maintenance build is a pretty big one as it changes a total of 135 files, with 972 insertions and 459 deletions. However, most of these changes are updated drivers, in particular for things like USB, SCSI, PCI, Virtio, InfiniBand, MMC, EDAC, GPU (mostly Radeon), ATA, DMA, MD, and networking.

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.12.56 kernel. All users of the 3.12 kernel series must upgrade," said Jiri Slaby. "The updated 3.12.y git tree 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."

The networking stack received many improvements

In addition to the updated drivers mentioned above, Linux kernel 3.12.56 LTS adds numerous improvements to the networking stack, for things like the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, but also IUCV, mac80211, rfkill, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), SunRPC, and Ceph.

The ARM and SPARC hardware architectures received minor improvements, and the Btrfs, NFS, and procfs filesystems have been updated. All users of an operating system powered by a Linux kernel package from the long-term supported 3.12 series are urged to update to Linux kernel 3.12.56 LTS as soon as possible.

Download Linux kernel 3.12.56 LTS.