14 DAY TRIAL // The Linux 4.17 kernel series has reached end of life earlier this week with the release of the nineteenth maintenance update (Linux 4.17.19) and it won't receive further updates.
Launched by Linus Torvalds on June 3, 2018, the Linux 4.17 kernel series introduced better hardware support thanks to the addition of support for Intel's Cannon Lake architecture, as well as support for the Nvidia Tegra Xavier processor.
It also added support for the Andes NDS32 RISC-like architecture and AMD's upcoming Radeon Vega 12 graphics processing units, and it deprecated several microarchitectures, including Blackfin, CRIS, FR-V, M32R, Metag, MN10300, SCORE, and TILE.
Linux kernel 4.17 also enabled Display Code (DC) support in the open-source AMDGPU driver for HDMI audio/sound, added support for Intel's High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital copy protection, and improved power management.
Linux kernel 4.17 reached end of life, upgrade to Linux kernel 4.18
As all good things must come to an end, Linux kernel 4.17 reached end of life with the Linux 4.17.19 maintenance update released on August 24, 2018. This means that there won't be any further updates, so it is recommended to upgrade to Linux kernel 4.18 as soon as possible.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.17.19 kernel. Note, this is the LAST 4.17.y kernel to be released, it is now end-of-life. Please move to 4.18.y at this time," said Greg Kroah-Hartman in a mailing list announcement. "All users of the 4.17 kernel series must upgrade."
Linux kernel 4.18 was launched by Linus Torvalds earlier this month on August 12, 2018, a release that introduces Spectre Variant 1 and 2 mitigations for the 32-bit ARM architecture, and Spectre Variant 4 mitigations for the ARM64 (AArch64) and ARMv8 architectures.
Also new in Linux kernel 4.18 is better support for USB Type-C and USB 3.2 connections, official support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 ARM SoC, a just-in-time compiler for eBPF programs on the 32-bit (x86) architecture, and better discard support for the F2FS file system.
If you are unable to upgrade to Linux kernel 4.18 by compiling the latest point release available on the kernel.org website, do not hesitate to ask your operating system vendor to upgrade the kernel packages to the Linux 4.18 kernel series. You shouldn't upgrade if you're using a long-term supported kernel.