14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few minutes ago, kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS.
As you may or may not know, Linux 4.4 is the newest and most advanced long-term supported (LTS) kernel branch, which is currently used in the popular Arch Linux rolling operating system, Solus, Manjaro Linux, as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Today's Linux kernel 4.4.5 update is the fifth maintenance build in the series, and according to the appended shortlog, it's a fairly normal one.
In numbers, Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS changes a total of 91 files, with 999 insertions and 412 deletions, but looking a little closer we can notice that the changes are split quite equally between architectures, filesystems, sound, and drivers updates. The new maintenance release should arrive soon in the operating systems mentioned above, as well as other OSes that use a kernel from the Linux 4.4 LTS series, in the coming days.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.5 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade," said 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."
What's new in Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS
Among the changes implemented by the kernel developers in the fifth update of the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series, we can mention various fixes to the ARM64 (AArch64), ARM, MIPS, PA-RISC, and x86 hardware architectures, updates to the ATA, GPU (mostly AMDGPU, Radeon, and Intel i915), I2C, IOMMU, MTD, PCI, thermal, USB, and VFIO, as well as a few core kernel improvements.
Additionally, Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS updates the sound stack with many improved drivers, and fixes several issues for the Btrfs, CIFS, and JFFS2 filesystems. We are informing OS vendors that they can now download the Linux 4.4.5 LTS kernel sources right now from the kernel.org website or via Softpedia.