Users of the Linux 4.4 LTS kernel branch are urged to update

Jan 12, 2017 23:05 GMT  ·  By

Only three days after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.4.41 LTS, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman is informing us today, January 12, 2017, about the immediate availability of the Linux 4.4.42 LTS kernel.

If you've been reading our reports on the latest Linux kernels, you should already be aware of the fact that Linux 4.4 is an LTS (Long Term Support) branch, used in various popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Arch Linux, and the security-oriented Alpine Linux. The new version, Linux kernel 4.4.42 LTS, is pretty hefty and changes a total of 92 files, with 903 insertions and 410 deletions.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.42 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade. 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," said Greg Kroah-Hartman.

Lots of updated USB drivers, some ARM64 improvements

Looking at the appended shortlog, we can notice that the biggest part of the Linux kernel 4.4.42 LTS update includes various improvements to the USB drivers, but there are also some changes for hwmon, IOMMU, Radeon, CLK, IRQ Chip, SCSI, PCI, MD, MMC, wireless, and Ethernet ones. Other than that, there are some ARM64/AArch64 improvements, along with small fixes to the ARM, x86, CRIS, MIPS, and s390 architectures.

The sound and networking stacks received minor enhancements as well, and if you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 series, we recommend updating to version 4.4.42 as soon as possible, or as soon as it lands in the stable software repositories of your OS. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel 4.4.42 LTS source archive is now available for download from kernel.org.