14 DAY TRIAL // It's time to upgrade the Linux kernel packages of our GNU/Linux distributions once more, as renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today, February 2, 2017, the release of Linux kernel 4.9.7.
While still not marked as "longterm" on the kernel.org website, the Linux 4.9 kernel series recently became LTS (Long Term Support), which means that it will be supported with security patches for a couple of years. It also means that OS vendors need to adopt the Linux 4.9 kernel series for their distros as soon as possible. Arch Linux and Solus are already powered by Linux kernel 4.9, so make sure you update your PCs right now.
As for Linux kernel 4.9.7, it comes one week after the release of Linux kernel 4.9.6 and changes a total of 67 files, with 534 insertions and 239 deletions, according to the appended shortlog. The patch includes mostly updated drivers, in particular for the Intel i915 graphics driver, but also for things like InfiniBand, Radeon, VC4, ISDN, I2C, PINCTRL, Virtio, FBDEV, and networking.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.7 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.
Users are urged to update to Linux kernel 4.9.7
The rest of the Linux kernel 4.9.7 patch is about small improvements to the NFS, XFS, and Btrfs filesystems, an updated networking stack with a couple of changes to the SunRPC protocol support, some minor fixes to the ARC, PA-RISC, s390, Tile, and x86 hardware architectures, and, of course, the usual mm and core kernel enhancements. Check out the complete changelog above for all the technical details on the changes.
In the meantime, if you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.9 series, we recommend updating to today's Linux kernel 4.9.7 release as soon as possible. It already landed for Solus users and it's coming very soon to Arch Linux and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, as well as other distros. You can also download the Linux kernel 4.9.7 source tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website.