They are coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you

Dec 31, 2017 15:30 GMT  ·  By

Renowned Linux kernel maintainer and developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a couple of days the release and immediate availability of the Linux 4.14.10 and 4.9.73 LTS kernels.

While Linux kernel 4.9.73 LTS is a small patch that changes a total of 22 files with 191 insertions and 56 deletions, the Linux 4.14.10 kernel is a major one, changing no less than 116 files, with 4023 insertions and 3424 deletions. According to the appended shortlog, most of the changes included in Linux kernel 4.14.10 are related to merging of the x86 low-level prep for kernel page table isolation.

"I'm announcing the release of the 4.14.10 [and 4.9.73] kernel. All users of the 4.14 [and 4.9] kernel series must upgrade," says Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.14.y [and 4.9.y] git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.14.y and 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."

Users are urged to update their installations as soon as possible

Apart from the x86 updates, Linux kernel 4.14.10 adds various improvements to the ARM64 (AArch64), PA-RISC, UM, PowerPC (PPC), and UniCore32 hardware architectures, updates ACPI, CLK, GPU (Intel i915 and Sun4i), MFD, Ethernet, NVDIMM, SPI, PCI, and PINCTRL drivers, as well as both the crypto and sound stacks. On the other hand, Linux kernel 4.9.73 LTS brings only a couple of x86 updates, along with a dozen of updated drivers.

You should study the appended shortlogs here and here if you're curious to know what exactly was changed in these new versions of the Linux 4.9 and 4.14 kernels. Meanwhile, if you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from either the Linux 4.14 or 4.9 LTS series, you are urged to update your installation as soon as possible to Linux kernel 4.14.10 or Linux kernel 4.9.73 LTS, whose sources you can download right now from kernel.org.