14 DAY TRIAL // A few moments ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of another set of updated kernels for Linux-based operating systems, namely Linux 4.11.3, 4.9.30 LTS, 4.4.70 LTS and 3.18.55.
These are all major updates and users should install them on their GNU/Linux distributions as soon as possible. According to their appended shortlogs (here, here, here and here), Linux kernel 4.11.3 changes a total of 198 files, with 1907 insertions and 856 deletions, Linux kernel 4.9.30 LTS changes 166 files, with 1650 insertions and 722 deletions, Linux kernel 4.4.70 LTS changes 111 files, with 996 insertions and 441 deletions, and Linux kernel 3.18.55 is here to change 61 files, with 427 insertions and 173 deletions.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.11.3 [4.9.30, 4.4.70 and 3.18.55] kernel. All users of the 4.11 [4.9, 4.4 and 3.18] kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.11.y [4.9.y, 4.4.y and 3.18.y] git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.11.y, git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y, git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y, and git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.18.y."
Lots of ARM and PowerPC changes, numerous updated drivers
These new kernel patches are here only five days after the release of their previous versions, and it looks like most of the changes are improvements for ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, though the s390, x86, MetaG, UM, MIPS and Alpha arches also received a bit of attention. Numerous drivers have been updated as well, including those for USB, Watchdog, PCI, UWB, SCSI, NVDIMM, wireless (ath9k, rtlwifi, mwifiex), IrDA, InfiniBand, IOMMU, MD, iiO, GPU (AMDGPU, Intel i915, Nouveau), GPIO, ACPI, EDAC, CPUIdle, and MTD devices.
Small bug fixes are also present for the NFS, F2FS, EXT4, and Ceph filesystems, as well as for both the networking and sound stacks. Please study the changelogs (links above) if you're curious about a specific fix. In the meantime, if you're using a GNU/Linux distro powered by a kernel from either the Linux 4.11, 4.9, 4.4 or 3.18 series, you need to update as soon as the new versions land in the stable repositories. The source tarballs of Linux kernels 4.11.3, 4.9.30 LTS, 4.4.70 LTS and 3.18.55 are available for download right now from kernel.org.