14 DAY TRIAL // Today, June 8, 2016, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the availability of the second maintenance release of the Linux 4.6 kernel series, urging all users to update as soon as possible.
Linux kernel 4.6 was announced by Linus Torvalds on May 15, 2016, but its adoption amongst various popular GNU/Linux operating systems is rather slow. Some waited for the first point release announced last week on June 1, with which lots of users reported boot issues, but only a couple are using it - OpenSuSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux, as far as we know.
It appears that the rest of the distributions prefer to use a long-term support (LTS) kernel releases, such as Linux 4.4, including the popular Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and the upcoming Solus 1.2. On the other hand, there are a few distros out there that have switched to Linux kernel 4.5 for some time now, so this might just be a good time for them to move to the Linux 4.6 branch.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.6.2 kernel. All users of the 4.6 kernel series must upgrade," says Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.6.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.6.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 4.6.2
According to the appended shortlog, Linux kernel 4.6.2 brings numerous enhancements to the MIPS hardware architecture, but also a few changes to ARM, PowerPC (PPC), and x86 platforms. The EXT4, XFS, AFFS, F2FS, and NFS filesystems have received various fixes as well. Moreover, there are many updated drivers, in particular for things like GPU (mostly Intel i915, AMDGPU, and the VMWare Linux graphics driver), hwmon, MFD, SCSI, and networking (many Atheros and Realtek wireless drivers).
In numbers, the second point release of Linux kernel 4.6 changes a total of 133 files, with 1,452 insertions and 490 deletions. If you are using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by kernel packages from the Linux 4.6 branch, we recommend that you update to the Linux kernel 4.6.2 release as soon as possible, or more precisely as soon as the updated version lands in the main software repositories of your operating system. You can also download the Linux kernel 4.6.2 sources via our website or from kernel.org.