14 DAY TRIAL // Jiri Slaby is announcing the release of the 70th maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series, which will be supported for a few more months in 2017.
Coming approximately one a half months after the release of Linux kernel 3.12.69 LTS, the Linux 3.12.70 LTS kernel is a big patch that brings numerous improvements across several of the supported drivers, filesystems, and architectures. According to the appended shortlog, it changes a total of 222 files, with 1973 insertions and 783 deletions, so updating is recommended for all users.
"I'm announcing the release of the 3.12.70 kernel. All users of the 3.12 kernel series must upgrade. 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," said Jiri Slaby.
Includes many AppArmor, ARM, OCFS2, and CIFS improvements
Taking a closer look at the changes included in the Linux 3.12.70 LTS kernel, we can notice numerous AppArmor enhancements for better security, updated networking and sound stacks, numerous improvements to the Btrfs, CIFS, OCFS2, 9p, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, F2FS, FUSE, HFS+, GFS2, JFFS2, NFS, ReiserFS, UBIFS, and XFS filesystems, as well as lots of changes to the ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), x86, m68k, CRIS, and PowerPC (PPC) architectures.
Of course, there's no new kernel maintenance update without some updated drivers, and Linux kernel 3.12.70 LTS includes fixes or improvements for the CLK, Intel GMA500, Radeon, HID, hwmon, I2C, InfiniBand, IOMMU, ISDN, MD, media, MMC, MTD, networking (Ethernet, Hyper-V, VMXNET3), PCI, PINCTRL, s390, SCSI, SSB, thermal, TTY, VFIO, VME, Xen, and countless USB enhancements.
Therefore, if you're using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 3.12 series, we recommend updating to Linux kernel 3.12.70 LTS as soon as possible. OS vendors who want to integrate this update on their infrastructures can now download the source tarball from kernel.org or via our website and compile/tweak it for their architectures.