Users of the Linux 4.9 kernel are urged to update

Jan 15, 2017 23:59 GMT  ·  By

Only three days after announcing the release of the third maintenance update to the Linux 4.9 kernel series, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman is now informing us about the availability of Linux kernel 4.9.4.

If you were afraid that your patch did not land in Linux 4.9, which is currently the most advanced stable kernel branch available for GNU/Linux distributions, or if you thought that your device didn't yet receive the right drivers, think again, because Linux kernel 4.9.4 is full of goodies. Yes, again, but this time the patch is a little smaller and fixes a total of 59 files, with 507 insertions and 205 deletions.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.4 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.

Networking improvements all over, some ARM and ARM64 changes

From the appended shortlog, we can notice that the major changes in the Linux 4.9.4 patch are mostly networking improvements, both for the drivers stack, which received better support for Realtek Wi-Fi cards and Mellanox (mlx5) Ethernet adapters, and the networking stack, bringing various fixes to the IPv4, IPv6, SCTP, and SunRPC protocols, as well as the Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA) subsystem.

Numerous ARM and ARM64/AArch64 changes are also present in the Linux 4.9.4 kernel, along with small bug fixes to the PowerPC (PPC) and x86 hardware architectures. Other than that, there's a quirk for the Plantronics BT600 high-fidelity Bluetooth USB adapter, and some minor fixes to the Intel i915 graphics driver. The Linux kernel 4.9.4 source archive is now available for download from kernel.org.

If you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.9 series, we urge you to update to Linux 4.9.4 as soon as possible, or as soon as the new version lands in the stable software repositories of the operating system you're currently using as daily driver. On this occasion, we're also urging OS vendors to move to the Linux 4.9 kernel series are soon as possible, especially if they're using Linux 4.8, which reached end of life last week.