14 DAY TRIAL // Today, July 27, 2016, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the availability of the fifth maintenance update for the Linux 4.6 kernel series, urging all users to update as soon as possible.
The Linux 4.6 kernel branch is no longer the most advanced one, but it is still the most stable as the recently released Linux 4.7 kernel is currently on the mainline channel and will move to become the stable series when the first point release is published. Therefore, Linux 4.6.5 appears to be the latest stable kernel version available right now for GNU/Linux operating systems, bringing changes to a total of 220 files, with 1,754 insertions and 998 deletions.
Among the improvements, we can notice lots of updated drivers, in particular for things like ATA, crypto, EDAC, External Connector Class (extcon), general-purpose input/output (GPIO), GPU (mostly Nouveau, but also AMDGPU, AMDKFD, Powerplay, Atmel HLCDC, Intel i915, mgag200, and vmwgfx), HID, iiO, hwmon, InfiniBand, IOMMU, MTD, PCI, SCSI, TTY, USB, and Xen.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.6.5 kernel. All users of the 4.6 kernel series must upgrade," says Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.6.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.6.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."
Users need to update their distributions to Linux kernel 4.6.5
Linux kernel 4.6.5 also adds various improvements to ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), MIPS, PowerPC (PPC), s390, and x86 hardware architectures, the Btrfs, CIFS, NFS, and OverlayFS filesystems, and updated networking and sound stacks with fixes for things like the IPv6 protocol support, mac80211 wireless framework, packet scheduler, SunRPC protocol, as well as Au88x0 and HDA Intel audio drivers.
If you're using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.6 series, we recommend that you update your installation to version 4.6.5 as soon as possible, or more precisely, as soon as it lands in the main software repositories of your distribution. We're also urging OS vendors to download the Linux kernel 4.6.5 sources right now via our website or from kernel.org and update the packages.