Users are urged to move to the most stable kernel version

May 21, 2017 23:59 GMT  ·  By

Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the Linux community about the release and immediate availability of the seventeenth maintenance update to the Linux 4.10 kernel series, which also marked the end of life.

As it's not an LTS (Long Term Support) branch, the Linux 4.10 kernel series was doomed to reach end of life sooner or later, and it happened this weekend with the release of the Linux kernel 4.10.17 patch, which is a major one changing a total of 103 files, with 981 insertions and 538 deletions, at least according to the appended shortlog. Therefore, users are now urged to move to the Linux 4.11 kernel series.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.10.17 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," said Greg Kroah-Hartman in the mailing list announcement. "Note, this is the LAST 4.10.y kernel to be released, it is now end-of-life. You must move to the 4.11.y kernel series now."

Upgrade to Linux kernel 4.11 as soon as possible if you're using Linux 4.10

If you're curious to know what was changed in the Linux 4.10.17 kernel, we can tell you that it brings various improvements to the x86, ARM64 (AArch64), ARM, and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, as well as to the CIFS, F2FS, Ceph, EXT4, JBD2, OrangeFS, and OverlayFS filesystems. It also updates a bunch of drivers for USB, TTY, InfiniBand, NVDIMM, MD, crypto, and Bluetooth devices.

The usual core kernel, mm and tools (perf) changes are also present, and if you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.10 series, you need to update to version 4.10.17 as soon as it makes its way into the stable repositories. However, please inform your OS vendor that they need to upgrade the kernel packages to the Linux 4.11 series immediately. You can download the Linux kernel 4.10.17 source tarball right now from kernel.org.