14 DAY TRIAL // On October 31, 2016, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman was proud to announce the release and general availability of the sixth maintenance update to the Linux 4.8 kernel series.
That's right, Linux kernel 4.8.6 is here, only three days after the quite big release of Linux kernel 4.8.5, but don't be fooled into thinking it's a small update because that's not the case. According to the appended shortlog and the diff from last week's Linux 4.8.5 build, it appears that today's Linux 4.8.6 kernel changes a total of 136 files, with 1387 insertions and 854 deletions.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.8.6 kernel. All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.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."
Here's what was changed since Linux kernel 4.8.5
As mentioned before, Linux kernel 4.8.6 is a fairly big release, and it looks like the biggest changes since Linux kernel 4.8.5 are updates to the AMDGPU, Crypto Marvell, AMD PowerPlay, Intel i915, Radeon, VC4, vmwgfx, InfiniBand, Ethernet (Intel i40e), Wireless (Atheros ath10k and Intel iwlwifi), Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMM), PCI, PINCTRL, s390, SCSI (mpt3sas and cxlflash), and staging drivers.
But there are also various other improvements to the ARM, PowerPC (PPC), and x86 hardware architectures, the Btrfs, Ceph, EXT2, EXT4, F2FS, JFFS2, JFS, OCFS2, OrangeFS, ReiserFS, and XFS filesystems, as well as the usual perf, mm, core kernel, and sound enhancements. If you're using a GNU/Linux distro powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.8 series, please update as soon as possible to Linux kernel 4.8.6, whose sources are available for download right now from kernel.org or through our website.