All users of the Linux 4.10 kernel branch must update

Mar 22, 2017 22:16 GMT  ·  By

Only four days after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.10.4, Greg Kroah-Hartman published today, March 22 2017, the fifth maintenance update to the Linux 4.10 kernel series.

Linux kernel 4.10.5 is not a major update, but it's not a small one either. According to the appended shortlog, a total of 69 files were changed in this release, with 587 insertions and 268 deletions. Most of these changes are various networking improvements, both for the driver stack and core networking. There's also better support for Intel chipsets and a few hardware architectures were improved as well.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.10.5 kernel. All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.10.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.

All users need to update their systems to Linux 4.10.5 immediately

Looking at the things that received attention in Linux kernel 4.10.5, we can notice an updated networking stack with various improvements to Bridge, DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol), IPv4, IPv6, L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol), MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), Open vSwitch, packet scheduler, SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol), and STRParser.

The networking improvements continue with updated Ethernet drivers for AMD 10GbE (amd-xgbe), Mellanox, as well as the use of ETH_MAX_MTU as max mtu for bonding. The Intel i915 driver also got some attention, and Linux kernel 4.10.5 adds better support for the x86, ARM64 (AArch64), and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures. If you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by the Linux 4.10 kernel, we recommend updating to version 4.10.5 as soon as possible.

The Linux 4.10.5 kernel sources are now available for download from kernel.org.