All users of the Linux 4.7 kernel branch must update

Sep 30, 2016 11:50 GMT  ·  By

Today, September 30, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the sixth maintenance update to the latest stable Linux 4.7 kernel series.

Linux kernel 4.7.6 comes only five days after the release of the previous maintenance version, Linux kernel 4.7.5, and, according to the appended shortlog and the diff from the last update, it changes a total of 76 files, with 539 insertions and 455 deletions. In summary, it updates multiple drivers, adds improvements to various filesystems and hardware architectures, and improves the networking stack.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.7.6 kernel. All users of the 4.7 kernel series must upgrade," says Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.7.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.7.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."

To land soon in the repos of your favorite distribution

Looking a little closer at the changes included in Linux kernel 4.7.6, we can mention that there are various improvements to the ARM64 (AArch64), MIPS, and x86 hardware architectures, a couple of crypto changes, small updates to the GPU, I2C, InfiniBand, IRQ Chip, MTD, power, RTC, SoC, and networking (mostly Ethernet) drivers, some mm and core kernel fixes, and an updated networking stack with mac80211 and Ceph changes.

Several filesystems received improvements as well in Linux kernel 4.7.6, among which we can mention XFS, Btrfs, Ceph, autofs4, HostFS, OCFS2, and ReiserFS. If you're using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.7 series, you are urged to update to version 4.7.6 as soon as possible. At the moment of writing this article, no distro includes Linux kernel 4.7.6, but you can download its sources right now from kernel.org or via our website.