14 DAY TRIAL // The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.14.2, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking yet another update in the most recent stable release.
The updates and improvements that preceded the launch of the Linux kernel 3.14 branch indicated that this was going to be one of the most interesting releases in quite a while, but the updates for this version have been lagging a little behind.
In the past, the first updates to the fresh kernel were quite large and featured a multitude of fixes and changes. Either the new kernels are more stable and require less work, or the developers are focusing more on the upcoming 3.15 branch.
“I'm announcing the release of the 3.14.2 kernel. All users of the 3.14 kernel series must upgrade.”
“The updated 3.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.14.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,” Greg Kroah-Hartman said in the email announcement.
According to the changelog, a crash that occurred due to the truncation of csize has been fixed, the kernel module no longer fails if the device doesn't recognize SYNCHRONIZE CACHE (SCSI), removing the Long Term Key is now working properly (Bluetooth), a hung task on sync has been fixed (backing_dev), an error return from ext4_ext_handle uninitialized extents() has been fixed, the partial cluster handling for bigalloc file systems has been corrected, and premature freeing of partial clusters split across leaf blocks has been fixed.
Also, the correct tty name is now set in “active” sysfs attribute, the circular locking dependency in comedi_mmap() has been fixed, a deadlock with nested trans handles on Btrfs has been fixed, a segmentation fault found in the stress test (jffs2) has been fixed, and the ACPI Button event has been added via the netlink routine.
If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.13.x branch, you should consider an update to this build, because 3.13.x reached EOL. You can also upgrade to the latest 3.15 RC2 version, although that would not be indicated until it reaches a stable version.
Linux kernel 3.14 features, among other things, better Intel Broadwell graphics support, various Radeon improvements, Nouveau improvements (support for new GPUs from NVIDIA), quite a few Btrfs changes, and even NVIDIA Tegra PRIME support.
A complete list of commits in this branch of the kernel can be found in the official announcement. You can download Linux kernel 3.14.2 right now from Softpedia.