Today, November 10, 2016, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the seventh maintenance update to the Linux 4.8 kernel series, along with the Linux kernel 4.4.31 LTS long-term support version.
Finally, the release cycle of Linux kernel 4.8 has settled in and it looks like more and more GNU/Linux distributions are adopting it, including the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 and Fedora 25, due for release next week. Rolling release users of Solus, Arch Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed are already enjoying the latest Linux kernel 4.8 updates, and soon they’ll receive a new one, Linux kernel 4.8.7, which comes ten days after Linux kernel 4.8.6.
“I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.7 kernel. All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade,” said 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.”
Key highlights of Linux kernel 4.8.7
Looking at the appended shortlog and the diff from the previous point release, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.7 is quite a big update that changes a total of 122 files, with 1096 insertions and 541 deletions. Most of the patch includes updated drivers for Intel i915 and Radeon GPUs, but also for wireless (Atheros ath10k and ath9k, as well as Realtek rtl8xxxu), PWM, I2C, MD, SCSI, SPI, virtio, USB, DAX, FireWire, TTY, and Android.
Other than that, there are a few improvements to the Btrfs, NFS, OverlayFS, UBIFS, and XFS filesystems, a couple of networking stack changes to the mac80211 wireless framework and Netfilter framework for networking-related operations, and updates to the support for ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), h8300, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC (PPC), s390, and x86 hardware architectures. Users are urged to update at their earliest convenience, and OS vendors to download Linux kernel 4.8.7 from kernel.org.
