14 DAY TRIAL // After announcing the release of Linux 4.10.2, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the availability of new maintenance updates to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 and 4.9 kernel series.
Linux kernels 4.9.14 LTS and 4.4.53 LTS are now available for users of GNU/Linux distributions that are powered by a kernel from these stable, long-term supported branches. They come about two weeks after their previous builds, namely Linux kernel 4.9.13 LTS and Linux kernel 4.4.52 LTS, and bring quite a number of improvements for various components.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.14 [and 4.4.53] kernel. All users of the 4.9 [and 4.4] kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.9.y [and 4.4.y] git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y and git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y," said Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Updated drivers, networking, Arch and filesystem improvements
According to the appended shortlogs (here and here), both releases include pretty much the same changes. However, the Linux 4.9.14 LTS kernel is a bit larger than Linux kernel 4.4.53 LTS. In numbers, there are 163 files changed in Linux 4.9.14 LTS, with 1739 insertions and 866 deletions, and only 107 files were changed in the Linux 4.4.53 LTS kernel, with 3338 insertions and 2896 deletions.
As for the changes included in the Linux 4.4.53 LTS and 4.9.14 LTS kernels, we can mention updates for BCMA, devfreq, DMA, HV, hwmon, hwtracing, iiO, InfiniBand, IOMMU, MD, media, MMC, MTD, networking (Atheros and Realtek wireless), PCI, power, regulator, remoteproc, RTC, SCSI, SPI, staging, USB, VME, virtio, and w1 drivers. There are also some improvements to both the networking and sound stacks.
In addition fo the above, the new maintenance updates include various improvements to the EXT4, F2FS, FUSE, GFS2, JBD2, and NFS filesystems, as well as the usual mm and core kernel changes. All users of the Linux 4.4 and 4.9 kernels are urged to update their operating systems to the Linux 4.4.53 LTS or 4.9.14 LTS releases as soon as possible. The source tarballs are available for download from kernel.org or via our website.