14 DAY TRIAL // On November 20, 2016, Linux kernel maintainer Ben Hutchings announced the release of the eighty-fourth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel series.
The Linux 3.2 LTS (Long Term Support) kernel branch appears to be the oldest supported for Linux-based operating systems, and it looks like it gets regular point releases almost every month. For example, the Linux kernel 3.2.84 LTS release is here exactly one month after the 3.2.83 update announced on October 21, 2016, which was a small patch fixing the infamous "Dirty COW" vulnerability.
"I'm announcing the release of the 3.2.84 kernel. All users of the 3.2 kernel series should upgrade," said Ben Hutchings. "The updated 3.2.y git tree can be found at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.2.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."
Linux kernel 3.2.84 LTS adds over 200 changes
According to the appended shortlog and the diff since Linux kernel 3.2.83 LTS, we can notice that Linux kernel 3.2.84 LTS is a major update that changes a total of 209 files, with 1277 insertions and 730 deletions. And it looks like there's something for everyone, starting with Arch updates for Alpha, ARM, AVR32, Blackfin, CRIS, FR-V, Hexagon, IA-64, M32R, MicroBlaze, MIPS, MN10300, OpenRISC, PA-RISC, PowerPC, s390, SH, SPARC, and x86.
Then there are filesystem improvements for 9p, Advanced Disc Filing System (ADFS), Btrfs, Ceph, CIFS, eCryptfs, EXOFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, FAT, FUSE, GFS2, HFS, HFS+, HostFS, High Performance File System (HPFS), HugeTLBfs, JFFS2, JFS, LogFS, NCPFS, NFS, NILFS2, NTFS, OCFS2, OMFS, RAMFS, ReiserFS, sysfs, UBIFS (UBI File System), UDF, UFS, and XFS. The networking stack was updated as well with multiple IPv4, Bluetooth, IPv6, IrDA, L2TP, Netfilter, Netlabel, SunRPC, and XFRM changes.
Last but not least, there are the updated drivers, this time for BCMA, Bluetooth (Atheros ath3k), FireWire, GPU (Radeon/AtomBIOS), hwmon, I2C, InfiniBand, MD, MTD, networking (Ethernet, Wireless brcm80211, PPP), s390, PPS, SCSI, TTY, USB, Virtio, and Xen devices, and the usual core kernel and mm changes with a little bit of sound, KVM, and security fixes. If you're running a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the Linux 3.2 series, please update to version 3.2.84 as soon as possible.
You can now download the Linux kernel 3.2.84 LTS source archive from kernel.org.