14 DAY TRIAL // Today, May 11, 2016, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the fourth maintenance build in the latest stable and most advanced Linux 4.5 kernel branch.
While not many GNU/Linux operating systems have adopted Linux kernel 4.5, its development cycle continues at a fast pace, introducing more and more improvements, security patches, and new capabilities. According to the appended shortlog, which also includes the diff from the previous maintenance release, Linux 4.5.3, the new update changes a total of 97 files, with 600 insertions and 238 deletions.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.5.4 kernel. All users of the 4.5 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.5.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.5.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."
Here's what's new in Linux kernel 4.5.4
Looking at the stats above, we can see that Linux kernel 4.5.4 is a relatively standard maintenance release, adding bugfixes for various ARM architectures, along with minor improvements to the PowerPC (PPC), x86, Arc, and PA-RISC instruction set architectures. Moreover, the networking stack has been updated with netfilter, mac80211, and B.A.T.M.A.N. Advanced changes, and there are various mm and core kernel fixes too.
However, the biggest changes in Linux kernel 4.5.4 are, as expected, updated drivers, in particular for things like GPU (mostly Intel i915 and AMDGPU), ACPI, ATA, CLK, CPUFreq, CPUIdle, general-purpose input/output (GPIO), HID, iiO, InfiniBand, LightNVM, MD, MFD, NVDIMM, NVMEM, PWM, SCSI, SoC, USB, Xen, and networking (mostly Wireless Marvell mwifiex, Realtek rtl8821ae, Atheros ath9k and ath10k). Download Linux kernel 4.5.4 right now from the kernel.org website.