All users of the Linux 4.7 kernel series must upgrade

Sep 25, 2016 21:25 GMT  ·  By

The fifth maintenance update to the Linux 4.7 kernel series, which is currently the most advanced, secure and stable kernel branch you can get for your GNU/Linux operating system, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman.

Linux kernel 4.7.5 is here only ten days after the release of the previous maintenance version, namely Linux kernel 4.7.4, and it's a big update that changes a total of 213 files, with 1774 insertions and 971 deletions, which tells us that the kernel developers and hackers had a pretty busy week patching all sorts of bugs and security issues, as well as adding various, much-needed improvements.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.7.5 kernel. All users of the 4.7 kernel series must upgrade," says Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.7.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.7.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."

ARM, x86, PPC, and core networking improvements, updated drivers

The appended shortlog and diff from the Linux 4.7.4 kernel shows us that Linux kernel 4.7.5 adds numerous improvements to the ARM, PowerPC (PPC), x86, SH, s390, PA-RISC, ARM64, OpenRISC, MIPS, MicroBlaze, M32R, ARC, Alpha, Blackfin, IA64, AVR32, CRIS, Hexagon, MetaG, MN10300, Nios II, SPARC, and FR-V hardware architectures, and updates the networking stack with various changes to things like IPv4, IPv6, IrDA, KCM, SCTP, SunRPC, Wireless, Bridge, Packet Scheduler, and TIPC.

Additionally, Linux kernel 4.7.5 updates many drivers, in particular those for ATA, iiO, InfiniBand, IOMMU, IRQ Chip, MD, MMC, Ethernet (Broadcom, Cavium, Mellanox, Cadence, SMSC), PINCTRL, Wireless, RapidIO, TTY, USB, and GPU devices, and improves the NFS, EXT4, and Btrfs filesystems. If you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.7 series, you are urged to update to version 4.7.5 as soon as possible. It's already available for Solus users, and you can download the sources now.