Users of the Linux 3.16 LTS kernel branch must update

Aug 24, 2016 23:55 GMT  ·  By

Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 3.2.82 LTS, maintainer Ben Hutchings proudly informed the community about the availability of the thirty-seventh maintenance update to the Linux 3.16 LTS kernel series.

Linux kernel 3.16.37 LTS is here five more than two months after the release of the previous update, and it looks like it's a big one. According to the diff from Linux kernel 3.16.36 LTS and the appended shortlog, Linux kernel 3.16.37 LTS changes a total of 294 files, with 3382 insertions and 2290 deletions. Most of the changes are core networking updates, but there are also lots of updated drivers, Arch improvements, and more.

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.16.37 kernel. All users of the 3.16 kernel series should upgrade," says Ben Hutchings. "The updated 3.16.y git tree can be found at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.16.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git."

Here's what's new in Linux kernel 3.16.37 LTS

As mentioned before, the biggest changes in Linux kernel 3.16.37 LTS are huge improvements to the networking stacks, especially for the packet scheduler, but also for the mac80211 wireless framework, B.A.T.M.A.N. Advanced, both the IPv6 and IPv4 protocols, Netfilter, Bridge, SunRPC, and TIPC (Transparent Inter-process Communication). And it also looks like various Ethernet, PHY, TUN, and Wireless drivers got updated too, for Broadcom, Mellanox, IBM, or Intel.

The list of changes continues with dozens of updated drivers, in particular for ACPI, ATA, Bluetooth, CPUFreq, CpuIdle, Crypto, EDAC, GPIO (General-purpose input/output), HID, iiO, InfiniBand, IOMMU, IRQ Chip, MCB, MFD, MMC, MTD, PCI, PINCTRL, s390, SCSI, SPI, TTY, USB, and Xen devices, multiple improvements to the Btrfs, CIFS, eCryptfs, EXT4, HPFS, NFS, NILFS2, UBIFS, and XFS filesystems, as well as better support for ARM, MIPS, AArch64, PowerPC (PPC), PA-RISC, x86, s390, Alpha, and ARC architectures.

If you're using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 3.16 series, we recommend that you update to the Linux kernel 3.16.37 LTS release as soon as possible, or more precisely as soon as the new version lands in the main software repositories of your distribution. On this occasion, we're also urging OS vendors and kernel maintainers of various OSes to download the Linux kernel 3.16.37 LTS sources right now from kernel.org or via our website and compile/tweak them for their users.