14 DAY TRIAL // We've been waiting for it, and it's finally here! The first point release of the Linux 4.9 kernel was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman this past weekend, which means that most modern GNU/Linux distributions can finally start migrating to the series.
Yes, we're talking about Linux kernel 4.9.1, the first of many maintenance updates to the Linux 4.9 kernel branch, which is now officially declared stable and ready for production. It's also a major release that changes a total of 103 files, with 813 insertions and 400 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.
Among the changes, we can notice that there are many updated drivers and filesystems. These include drivers for CLK, CPUFreq, Crypto, MD, NVM Express (NVMe), watchdog, Xen, and USB devices, as well as Btrfs, CIFS, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS filesystems. The rest of the patch consists of some mm, Arch, sound, and core kernel fixes.
The Alpha, ARM, Blackfin, CRIS, IA64, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 hardware architectures have received small fixes, but other than that, there's nothing impressive in this first update of the Linux 4.9 kernel series, which was initially unveiled by Linus Torvalds himself last month, on December 11.
Users urged to update to Linux kernel 4.9.1
You should know the drill already, if you're using a modern Linux-based operating system powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.9 series, or even if you're using the latest maintenance update of a previous branch, such as Linux kernel 4.8.16, you are urged to update as soon as possible to Linux kernel 4.9.1.
Those interested in migrating to Linux kernel 4.9 can browse the updated 4.9.y git tree at the normal kernel.org git web browser http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary, or download the source archive to compile it themselves. Linux kernel 4.9.1 is now the most advanced stable kernel available on the market.