All users of the Linux 3.12 LTS kernel branch must upgrade

Nov 28, 2015 21:59 GMT  ·  By

We reported earlier today, November 28, 2015, that kernel developer Ben Hutchings had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Linux kernel 3.2.74 LTS. Immediately after his announcement, kernel developer Jiri Slaby has informed users about the general availability of Linux kernel 3.12.51 LTS.

Being a long-term supported release, Linux 3.12 has received its fifty-first maintenance release, which, according to the appended shortlog, brings multiple improvements to the x86, ARM, ARM64, and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures. It also comes with crypto fixes, networking updates, especially for things like IPv4, IPv6, IrDA (Infrared Data Association), Netfilter, Bridge, SunRPC, and Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS).

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.12.51 kernel. All users of the 3.12 kernel series must upgrade," said Jiri Slaby in today's announcement made on the Linux kernel mailing list. "The updated 3.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.12.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."

Drivers updates and Ceph filesystem improvements

Linux kernel 3.12.51 LTS also updates many drivers, especially for things like ATA, GPU (mostly Nouveau), InfiniBand, IOMMU (I/O Memory Management Unit), MD, MFD, networking (mostly Ethernet, Wireless, Macvtap, and PPP), SCSI, SPI, TTY, and USB. Furthermore, the Ceph filesystem received some improvements in this new maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel.

As noted above, Jiri Slaby informs all users of GNU/Linux operating systems powered by a kernel from the Linux 3.12 LTS branch that they need to upgrade their kernel packages to the new 3.12.51 version as soon as possible. This can be done either by installing it from the default software repositories of their distributions or by downloading the Linux kernel 3.12.51 LTS sources via Softpedia or kernel.org website and compiling it by hand.