All users of the Linux 3.16 LTS kernel branch need to update

Mar 17, 2017 21:59 GMT  ·  By

Immediately after releasing the Linux 3.2.87 LTS kernel, Ben Hutchings announced the release and general availability of the forty-second maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.16 kernel series.

Linux kernel 3.16.42 LTS comes two and a half weeks after the release of the Linux 3.16.41 LTS kernel patch and is a massive update that changes a total of 339 files, with 3027 insertions and 1429 deletions. There are all sorts of improvements, for the networking and sound stacks, various filesystems and architectures, as well as dozens of updated drivers.

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.16.42 kernel. All users of the 3.16 kernel series should upgrade. The updated 3.16.y git tree can be found at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.16.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git," said Ben Hutchings in the mailing list announcement.

The many improvements of the Linux 3.16.42 LTS kernel

Linux 3.16.42 LTS improves support for the ARC, ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), CRIS, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC (PPC), Sparc, Tile, and x86 hardware architectures, improvements to ATA, Bus, CLK, crypto, GPU (Intel i915, Intel GMA500, Nouveau, Radeon), HID, hwmon, I2C, iiO, InfiniBand, IOMMU, MD, ISDN, media, MMC, networking (Ethernet Atheros, Broadcom, Cisco, Emulex, Marvell, Mellanox, Renesas, STMicroelectronics, Xilinx), PCI, s390, SCSI, SSB, thermal, TTY, VME, Xen, and USB drivers.

The Btrfs, CIFS, Ceph, EXT4, F2FS, NFS, OCFS2, UBIFS, and XFS filesystems have also been improved, and numerous mm and core kernel bug fixes have been introduced. The sound and networking stacks also come with many changes for various of the supported components, including CAN, Bridge, Ceph, DCCP, DECnet, IrDA, IPv4, IPv6, L2TP, LLC, mac80211, Netfilter, packet scheduler, SCTP, SunRPC, vmw_vsock, wireless, ALSA, and many others.

Those of you who are using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 3.16 series are urged to update their installations to the Linux kernel 3.16.42 LTS patch as soon as possible, or as soon as it lands in the stable software repositories. OS vendors are also urged to download the source tarball of the Linux 3.16.42 LTS kernel from kernel.org or via our website, compile and tweak it for their supported architectures, and seed it to their users.