14 DAY TRIAL // It's been a little over one week since the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel was announced by Linus Torvalds, and the first point release is already out to mark it as "stable" and ready for mass deployments.
Renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the Linux 4.14.1 kernel, the first point release of the Linux 4.14 kernel series, which is the first to be supported for the next few years. The Linux 4.14.1 kernel is marked as "stable" on the kernel.org website, giving the green light to OS developers to add it to their repositories.
Arch Linux developers have already pushed the Linux 4.14.1 kernel to the "Testing" repositories, for early adopters, so we may soon see a rebase of the operating system on Linux kernel 4.14, which brings major new features like support for AMD Secure Memory Encryption, Heterogeneous Memory Management to support upcoming GPUs, and bigger memory limits in x86 hardware.
It also improves the cpufreq behavior, the kernel traces, and the size of the kernel, introduces zstd compression for both the Btrfs and SquashFS file systems, adds asynchronous non-blocking buffered reads, as well as the ability to zero-copy data from user memory to sockets. Also, Linux kernel 4.14 comes with support for the PCID instruction for faster TBL flushing.
Linux kernel 4.14 LTS will be supported until 2023
While Linux 4.14 is not yet marked as "longterm" on the kernel.org website, from where you can download the Linux 4.14.1 source tarball if you want to compile the kernel on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, it will be supported for the next few years with security patches distributed through similar point releases. This makes Linux 4.14 a great choice for big deployments.
In the coming days or weeks, we expect to see the Linux 4.14 kernel coming to a number of popular GNU/Linux distributions that follow a rolling release model, including the aforementioned Arch Linux, as well as openSUSE Tumbleweed and possibly Solus if the devs decide to replace the Linux 4.9 LTS kernel they currently use on the distro with the new long-term supported Linux 4.14 kernel.