Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.9.8, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman published the forty-seventh maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
Just like Linux kernel 4.9.8, the Linux 4.4.47 LTS kernel is here only two days after its previous point release, in this case Linux kernel 4.4.46 LTS, and, according to the appended shortlog, it’s yet another small patch that changes a total of 22 files, with 141 insertions and 55 deletions. The patch includes only networking improvements, both for core networking and the drivers stack.
“I’m announcing the release of the 4.4.47 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.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.
Linux 4.4.47 LTS brings updated Mellanox, Broadcom, and Renesas Ethernet drivers
As mentioned before, Linux kernel 4.4.47 LTS is all about networking changes with various improvements to the Mellanox, Broadcom, and Renesas Ethernet drivers (memory leak fixes), the Broadcom BCM63xx PHY driver, the Realtek RTL8152/RTL8153 USB Ethernet driver, and a couple of other USB drivers. On the other hand, the networking stack was updated with AX.25, IPv4, IPv6, Open vSwitch, Bridge, and DSA (Distributed Switch Architecture) changes.
At the moment, Linux 4.4 LTS is the most popular long-term supported kernel branch, used in various popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Alpine Linux, Linux Mint 18.1, openSUSE Leap 42.2, Arch Linux, and many others. It is recommended to update your systems to Linux kernel 4.4.47 LTS as soon as possible, and you can also download the tarball from kernel.org or via our website if you fancy compiling it yourself from soruces.
