Users of the Linux 4.9 series should update immediately

Jan 20, 2017 18:50 GMT  ·  By

A new maintenance update of the Linux 4.9 kernel series was announced today by renowned Linux kernel maintainer and developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, versioned 4.9.5.

Coming only five days after the previous point release, Linux kernel 4.9.5 appears to be a big milestone that changes a total of 132 files, with 1515 insertions and 821 deletions. There are numerous improvements implemented in this fifth Linux 4.9 maintenance update, but first we'd like to remind you that Greg Kroah-Hartman recently marked this kernel branch as long-term supported (LTS), yet this is not apparent from kernel.org.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.5 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.9.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 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," said Greg Kroah-Hartman.

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From the appended shortlog, we can notice that the biggest part of the Linux kernel 4.9.5 patch includes updated drivers. This time, the developers managed to improve the support for open-source Radeon, Intel i915, Tegra, and VC4 graphics drivers, but there are also updated I2C, CPUFreq, ACPI, DMA, InfiniBand, Ethernet (Mellanox MLX5), wireless (Intersil), NVM Express (NVMe), PINCTRL, USB, TTY, and remoteproc drivers.

Other than that, Linux kernel 4.9.5 includes various PowerPC (PPC), x86 (KVM changes mostly), ARM64/AArch64, Btrfs, NFS, OCFS2, and XFS improvements, along with the usual mm and core kernel noise, tooling fixes, and an updated networking stack with a fix for the new 802.11 netlink interface public header. If you're using the Linux 4.9 kernel series on your GNU/Linux distribution, we recommend updating as soon as possible to version 4.9.5, which you can download right now from our website.