All users of the Linux 4.8 kernel series must update

Dec 8, 2016 23:20 GMT  ·  By

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.

While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.8.13 kernel. All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.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."

Minor AMDGPU improvements, lots of ARM64 fixes

Looking at the changes, we can notice that Linux kernel 4.8.13 brings updated ADMGPU and Radeon graphics drivers with fixes for the availability of port PM, lots of ARM64 (AArch64) improvements, but also some small fixes for the x86 and ARC architectures, updated ATA (libata-scsi), CLK (sunxi), Intel i915, MediaTek, wireless (Marvell mwifiex), PCI-E, PWM, and SCSI drivers.

There's also a fix for the OverlayFS file system, support for detecting missing primaryif during tp_send as an error to the B.A.T.M.A.N. Advanced routing protocol, a few KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) improvements, and a bunch of core kernel and mm changes. The Linux kernel 4.8.13 source archive is now available for download from kernel.org and we recommend to update as soon as possible.