14 DAY TRIAL // One day after Linus Torvalds' announcement on Linux kernel 4.8, Jiri Slaby releases the sixty-fourth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series.
Linux kernel 3.12.64 LTS is here approximately one month after the release of the previous maintenance update, namely Linux kernel 3.12.63 LTS, and, according to the diff and appended shortlog, it's a big patch that changes a total 135 files, with 924 insertions and 481 deletions. The Linux 3.12 kernel branch is here to stay for one more year, until 2017, because SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 1 is using it.
"I'm announcing the release of the 3.12.64 kernel. All users of the 3.12 kernel series must upgrade," says 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."
EXT4 improvements, updated networking stack, and much more
A lot of hardware architectures received improvements in the Linux 3.12.64 LTS kernel release, among which we can mention Alpha, ARC, ARM, ARM64, AVR32, Blackfin, CRIS, FR-V, Hexagon, IA64, M32R, MetaG, MicroBlaze, MIPS, MN10300, OpenRISC, PA-RISC, PowerPC, s390, SH, SPARC, and x86. Moreover, various issues have been resolved for the EXT4, NFS, and UBIFS filesystems.
The networking stack has been improved as well, with changes to the IPv6 and IPv4 protocols, the mac80211 wireless framework, Netfilter and IrDA components, and there are the usual driver updates, this time bringing better support for USB, SCSI, ISDN, GPIO, GPU, EDAC, and ACPI devices. If you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the Linux 3.12 series, you are urged to update to Linux kernel 3.12.64 LTS as soon as possible. Its sources are available for download right now from kernel.org or via our website.