14 DAY TRIAL // After informing the community about the availability of Linux kernel 4.7.3 and Linux kernel 4.4.20 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS.
Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS is the seventy-eighth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel series, which appears to approach its end of life soon, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman, who states, "The 3.14.y kernel series is coming to an end. There will be only one more release after this one, of this kernel series before it will be marked as end-of-life. You have been warned."
So there you have it, the Linux 3.14 LTS kernel branch is finally coming to an end, and you'll have to decide sooner or later to which new long-term supported kernel series to upgrade, because after the last maintenance update is released, which should happen before the end of the month, there won't be any other patches and security fixes released for Linux kernel 3.14 LTS.
Users are urged to upgrade to Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS now
As for the Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS update, this is the latest stable release, and it brings with it modifies to a total of 46 files, with 271 insertions and 111 deletions, which shows us that there aren't many changes, only some updated USB, SCSI, PCI, ACPI, EDAC, s390, and GPIO drivers, a couple of mac80211 wireless framework improvements, and small fixes to the AArch64 (ARM64), x86, and PA-RISC hardware architectures.
If you're using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 3.14 series, we recommend that you update as soon as possible to the 3.14.78 release. OS vendors and kernel maintainers of various distributions can now download the Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS source archive via our website or from the kernel.org, compile it and optimize it for their platforms.