14 DAY TRIAL // It looks to us like the Linux 3.18 kernel series is not dead, at least not at the moment, as Greg Kroah-Hartman just announced a few moments ago the release of the third maintenance update since the branch reached end of life back in February 2017.
That's right, we're talking about Linux kernel 3.18.51, which comes about eight days after the Linux 3.18.50 patch released last week. According to the appended shortlog, Linux kernel 3.18.51 is here to change a total of 62 files, with 408 insertions and 286 deletions, and users are once again encouraged to update their systems running a kernel from the Linux 3.18 series at their earliest convenience.
"I'm announcing the release of the 3.18.51 kernel. All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 3.18.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.18.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 Greg Kroah-Hartman.
MIPS, ARM, and CIFS improvements, a bunch of updated drivers
Looking at the things that received attention in this new maintenance update of the Linux 3.18 kernel series, we can notice some minor improvements to the ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), MIPS, PowerPC (PPC), s390, and x86 hardware architectures, as well as to the CIFS, NFS, and Btrfs filesystems. There are also various core kernel, mm, and security fixes included in the new patch.
The rest are updated drivers, this time for ACPI, CLK, input (Elantech mouse driver), IOMMU, MD, media (tuner-xc2028), MMC, MTD, networking (Ethernet (neterion, tulip) and Wireless (brcm80211 and HostAP)), SCSI (aic94xx), TTY, USB, and VFIO devices. You can download the source tarball of the Linux 3.18.51 kernel right now from kernel.org or via our website, and remember to update your system(s) ASAP.