14 DAY TRIAL // After announcing earlier today the release of the Linux 4.10.15, 4.9.27 LTS and 4.4.67 LTS kernels, Greg Kroah-Hartman also released yet another maintenance update for the Linux 3.18 kernel series.
The Linux 3.18 branch continues to be marked as [EOL] - End of Life - on the kernel.org website, but it also continues to receive large patches that contain numerous improvements and miscellaneous bug fixes. Linux kernel 3.18.52 being the latest in the series, it changes a total of 97 files, with 741 insertions and 346 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.
"I'm announcing the release of the 3.18.52 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.
Networking and filesystems improvements, lots of updated drivers
Looking at the shortlog, we can notice that Linux Kernel 3.18.52 includes a little bit of everything, starting with small improvements to the ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), MIPS, SPARC, x86, and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, updated sound and networking stacks with various fixes to ALSA, 9p, IPv6, L2TP, RDS, SCTP, and packet scheduler, and a few enhancements to the CIFS, F2FS, EXT4, EXT2, Btrfs, 9p, Ceph, GFS2, JFFS2, OCFS2, NFS, ReiserFS, XFS, and HFS+ filesystems.
The usual core kernel and mm changes are also present, and the driver stack has been updated with various improvements for the InfiniBand, ISDN, MD, media, MTD, networking (Ethernet (Intel e1000e, Mellanox MLX4 and MLX5), PHY), PCI, SCSI, TTY, and USB drivers. If you're still using a kernel from the Linux 3.18 series on your GNU/Linux operating system, you are encouraged to update it to version 3.18.52 as soon as possible. The Linux 3.18.52 kernel source tarball is available for download right now from kernel.org or via our website.