14 DAY TRIAL // Just a little over a week after the release of the Linux 4.17 kernel series, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the availability of the first point release, Linux kernel 4.17.1.
Even if it's a small one changing only 23 files, with 131 insertions and 68 deletions, the Linux kernel 4.17.1 point release marks the Linux 4.17 kernel series as ready for mass deployments, which means that OS vendors can now start compiling it for their supported architectures and GNU/Linux operating systems to distribute the new kernel version to their users.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.17.1 kernel. All users of the 4.17 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.17.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.17.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 in the mailing list announcement.
Upgrade to Linux kernel 4.17 now
Released by Linus Torvalds earlier this month on June 3, the Linux 4.17 kernel series adds various improvements to offer Linux users better hardware support and a faster kernel. It deprecates the Blackfin, CRIS, FR-V, M32R, Metag, MN10300, SCORE, and TILE architectures, but adds support for the Andes NDS32 RISC-like architecture, support for Intel's Cannon Lake architecture, as well as support for the Nvidia Tegra Xavier processor.
Linux kernel 4.17 also adds support for AMD's upcoming Radeon Vega 12 graphics processing units, enables Display Code (DC) support in the open-source AMDGPU driver for HDMI audio/sound, along with better power management. Additionally, it supports Intel's High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital copy protection and updates numerous other drivers, architectures, and filesystems.
If you want to install the Linux 4.17 kernel series on your GNU/Linux distribution, now is the time as the kernel has been marked as stable and ready for mass deployments on the kernel.org website with the Linux kernel 4.17.1 point release. You can download the source tarball right now and compile it yourself or ask your OS vendor to distribute the new kernel series. However, if you're using a long-term supported kernel, you shouldn't update just yet.