14 DAY TRIAL // The Linux kernel is seeing a lot of improvements lately, yes again, and the newest stable Linux 4.9 series has already received its second point release, two days after Greg Kroah-Hartman's announcement for Linux kernel 4.9.1.
With the availability of Linux kernel 4.9.1, users are now finally able to migrate from other kernel series to Linux 4.9, which is the most advanced version available on the market. But do not bother to attempt a compilation of Linux kernel 4.9.1 because Linux kernel 4.9.2 is already here, bringing lots of improvements.
From the appended shortlog, we can't help but notice that there's now better support for AMD Radeon HD 8000 series of graphics cards, and it just happens that we have a laptop with hybrid AMD/Intel GPUs running an AMD Radeon HD 8750 discrete card. So, like many of you out there, this comes as good news to us.
There are a total of 141 files changed in the Linux 4.9.2 kernel, with 1031 insertions and 438 deletions, so you can imagine that there are quite a few improvements, in particular to the AMDGPU, Nouveau, Intel i915, InfiniBand, DVB, MMC, wireless (many Atheros and Realtek fixes), SCSI (s390 too), thermal, staging, and TTY drivers.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.2 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.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," said Greg Kroah-Hartman.
It's already in Arch Linux Testing, and it's coming soon to other rolling distros
Some ACPI improvements are there as well in Linux kernel 4.9.2, bringing better support for the Dell XPS 17 L702X and HP Pavilion dv6 notebooks, and there's also improved support for the NFS file system, and the ARC, ARM64/AArch64, PowerPC (PPC), s390, and x86 hardware architectures.
Other than that, it looks like the networking stack was updated with small mac80211, Ceph, SunRPC, vmw_vsock, and wireless enhancements. Linux kernel 4.9.2 is available for download right now, either via our web portal or directly from kernel.org, if you fancy compiling your own kernel from sources.
If not, it should soon be available in the stable repositories of various rolling distributions, including Arch Linux (now in testing) and Solus (also in testing). And considering the fact that the Linux 4.8 series reached end of life, we recommend switching to Linux 4.9 as soon as possible.