14 DAY TRIAL // Lately, new kernel releases are pushed like crazy, but we don't complain, as they always try to improve support for our devices or introduce security and bug fixes.
Just four days after the release of Linux kernel 4.8.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on November 19 the availability of the ninth maintenance update in the stable series, which currently powers several rolling distributions, including the popular Arch Linux, Solus, and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Linux kernel 4.8.9 is a fairly normal point release that changes a total of 97 files, with 725 insertions and 399 deletions.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.8.9 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."
Here's what was changed since Linux kernel 4.8.8
Looking at the appended shortlog and the diff since Linux kernel 4.8.8, we can notice that Linux kernel 4.8.9 comes with an updated networking stack that includes multiple improvements for the SunRPC remote procedure call protocol, along with some minor Netfilter, B.A.T.M.A.N. Advanced, and Ceph fixes, a workaround to the -Wmaybe-uninitialized warning for NFS v4.1 filesystems, and a few sound stack updates.
Moreover, it looks like there are a few improvements to the s390, x86, and ARC architectures, and dozens of updated drivers, in particular for things like GPU (AMDGPU, AMD GPU Scheduler, Intel i915, and Radeon), general-purpose input/output (GPIO), iiO, IOMMU, MMC, NFC, NVM Express (NVMe), PINCTRL, PCI, RTC, SCSI, TTY, USB, Ethernet, and Watchdog. Download Linux kernel 4.8.9 source archive now from kernel.org.