14 DAY TRIAL // Just ten days after we reported that the stable Linux 4.5 kernel series got its first point release, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman Linux now informs the community about the availability of Linux kernel 4.5.2.
Linux kernel 4.5.2 is the second maintenance build for the latest and most advanced kernel branch, which more and more GNU/Linux operating system are adopting lately, including the popular OpenSuSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux rolling distributions.
From the diff attached to Mr. Kroah-Hartman announcement, it appears that there are quite some changes implemented in this second point release of Linux kernel 4.5. In numbers, a total of 147 files were changed, with 1259 insertions and 557 deletions.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.5.2 kernel. All users of the 4.5 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.5.y git tree 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 4.5.2
Looking at the appended shortlog, Linux kernel 4.5.2 adds minor improvements to the Btrfs, OverlayFS, NFS, and EXT4 filesystems, as well as to the ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC (PPC), s390, and x86 architectures. Core kernel, crypto, and sound changes are also present.
Moreover, the networking stack received various enhancements as well, in particular for things like IPv6, IPv4, DSA (Distributed Switch Architecture), Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP), Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP), the mac80211 framework, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and the XFRM IP framework.
As with any new maintenance release of a Linux kernel, numerous drivers have been updated, and Linux kernel 4.5.2 includes improvements for GPIO (general-purpose input/output), the AMDGPU open-source video driver, HID, iiO, hwmon, IOMMU, MMC, networking (mostly Ethernet), NVDIMM, PCMCIA, PINCTRL, SCSI, USB, Virtio, and Xen.
All users of GNU/Linux distributions running a kernel from the Linux 4.5 series are urged to upgrade to the 4.5.2 point release as soon as possible, or more precisely as soon as the new version lands in the main software repositories of the respective OS. The sources of Linux kernel 4.5.2 are also available from the kernel.org website.