Today, October 7, 2016, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman proudly announced the availability of the first point release to the latest Linux 4.8 kernel series.
As you might know already, Linux kernel 4.8 launched on October 2, as announced by Linus Torvalds himself, and it brought quite some interesting changes, including AMDGPU OverDrive support, Nvidia Pascal support, AMDGPU PowerPlay improvements, support for Raspberry Pi 3’s Broadcom BCM2837 system-on-chip (SoC), as well as support for Microsoft Surface 3 touch controller.
As with any new kernel branch, the first one is always marked as mainline, which means that it’s not yet ready to be deployed in stable GNU/Linux distributions, but only in those that are currently in development, such as Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak). The status of the new kernel series changes to stable as soon as the first point release is out. Therefore, Linux kernel 4.8.1 is now stable enough to be used by any Linux-based OS.
“I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.1 kernel. All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade,” says Greg Kroah-Hartman. “The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.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.”
The infamous kernel bug was fixed
We also reported the other day that Linus Torvalds apologized for the inclusion of a kernel bug in the Linux 4.8 release, which shouldn’t have affected anyone because no stable distribution was using it. We told you then that it was just a matter of time before Linux kernel 4.8.1 would be out to fix that issue and let OS vendors ship the new Linux 4.8 kernel series in the stable repositories of their operating systems.
Now we just need to wait and see which is the first stable (rolling or not) distro to offer the new Linux 4.8 kernel to its users. We have all the reasons to believe that Arch Linux and/or Solus will be the first, but next week, on October 13, Ubuntu 16.10 is hitting the streets powered by Linux kernel 4.8. If you’re not using any of these distros, go ahead and download the Linux kernel 4.8.1 sources right now from kernel.org.
