14 DAY TRIAL // Immediately after informing us about the availability of Linux kernel 4.8.5, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the release of the twenty-eighth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
That's right, Linux kernel 4.4.28 LTS is here, coming one week after the release of the previous maintenance version, and promising to change a total of 119 files, with 1310 insertions and 667 deletions, at least according to the appended shortlog and the diff from Linux kernel 4.4.27 LTS. The Linux 4.4 kernel branch is LTS (Long Term Support) and currently used in some of the most stable and reliable operating systems.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.28 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.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."
Includes CIFS and PowerPC improvements, lots of updated drivers
Looking at the changes, we can notice that the Linux 4.4.28 LTS kernel release adds various improvements to the PowerPC (PPC), x86, ARM64 (AArch64), ARC, MIPS, METAg, PA-RISC, and s390 hardware architectures, better support for Common Internet File System (CIFS), along with small fixes to the Ceph, JBD2, EXT4, NFS, OverlayFS, and ISOFS filesystems. But there are also some core kernel, mm, sound, and perf enhancements.
Other than that, Linux kernel 4.4.28 LTS ships with many updated drivers, this time for things like s390, SCSI, fbdev, IRQ Chip, ACPI, GPIO, CPUFreq, MD, MMC, MTD, PCI, and networking (Ethernet Broadcom bnx2x and Mellanox mlx4, but also Wireless Realtek rtlwifi). The Linux kernel 4.4.28 LTS source archive is available for download right now from kernel.org or through our website, and we urge all users to update immediately.