Linux 5.2.21 is the last maintenance release in the series

Oct 15, 2019 13:03 GMT  ·  By

Greg Kroah-Hartman, a renowned Linux kernel developer, recently announced that the Linux 5.2 kernel series has reached end of life and that users must now upgrade to Linux kernel 5.3.

Released in early July 2019, the Linux 5.2 kernel series brought various new features and enhancements, among which we can mention an open-source firmware to support DSP audio devices, support for case-insensitive names in the EXT4 file system, a new file system mount API, better resource monitoring for Android devices, as well as new open-source GPU drivers for ARM Mali devices.

Additionally, Linux kernel 5.2 introduced some performance improvements to the BFQ I/O scheduler, a new CPU bug infrastructure that better protects your computers against the recently disclosed Intel MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) hardware vulnerabilities, and a new device mapper "dust" target for simulating devices with failing sectors and read failures.

But, as all good things must come to an end, the Linux 5.2 kernel has now reached end of life with the 5.2.21 maintenance update released by Greg Kroah-Hartman last week. Therefore, users are now urged to update their Linux systems to a more recent Linux kernel series, specifically Linux kernel 5.3.

"I'm announcing the release of the 5.2.21 kernel. All users of the 5.2 kernel series must upgrade.," said Greg Kroah-Hartman in a mailing list announcement. "Note, this is the LAST 5.2 kernel to be released, it is now end-of-life. You must move to the 5.3.y kernel series at this point in time."

Upgrading to Linux kernel 5.3

Linux kernel 5.3 was announced last month with support for Intel Speed Select on Xeon servers, support for AMD Radeon Navi graphics cards, support for Zhaoxin x86 processors, support for the clamping mechanism in power-asymmetric CPUs, support for the ACRN embedded hypervisor, support for 16 millions new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range, and support for the umwait x86 instructions for more power efficient userspace.

If you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by the Linux 5.2 kernel series, it is highly recommended that you either update it to the latest Linux 5.2.21 maintenance update, which you can download right now from kernel.org or via our free Linux software portal here, or upgrade to the latest version of the Linux 5.3 kernel series, namely Linux kernel 5.3.6 at the moment of writing.

To upgrade the kernel packages to the Linux 5.3 kernel series, you must ask your Linux OS vendor to make the new version available in the stable software repositories and then simply update your installation, or you can compile the Linux kernel 5.3.6 sources yourself by downloading it from kernel.org or through our free Linux software portal.