14 DAY TRIAL // Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.7.4 as the latest stable and most advanced kernel version, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the twenty-first maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
That's right, Linux kernel 4.4.21 is here as the most advanced LTS (Long Term Support) kernel build, and it's a big one, as according to the appended shortlog and the diff from the previous maintenance version, namely Linux kernel 4.4.20 LTS, it changes a total of 207 files, with 3033 insertions and 1811 deletions. So yes, that's a pretty big kernel update for all GNU/Linux distributions powered by the Linux 4.4 LTS series, such as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.21 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade," says Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.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."
Linux kernel 4.4.21 LTS contains lots of updated networking drivers
If you're wondering what's new in Linux kernel 4.4.21 LTS that makes it such a big update, we can tell you that the major part of the patch is occupied by updated drivers, in particular for GPU (mostly Intel i915 and Radeon), Bluetooth, CPUFreq, Crypto, HV, InfiniBand, IRQ Chip, LightNVM, MD, MMC, NVMe, Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), s390, SCSI, VHost, and networking, lots and lots of Ethernet networking drivers.
There are also various improvements to the EXT4, OverlayFS, UBIFS, and XFS filesystems, an updated sound stack with Firewire enhancements, and updated networking stack with IPv4, IPv6, Netfilter, Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), and Transparent Inter-process Communication (TIPC) changes, as well as multiple core kernel fixes. All users are urged to update as soon as possible, and you can download the Linux kernel 4.4.21 LTS sources right now from kernel.org or via our website.