Immediately after announcing on August 10, 2016, the availability of Linux kernel 4.6.6 for GNU/Linux distributions, Greg Kroah-Hartman also informs us about the release of Linux kernel 4.4.17 LTS.
The Linux 4.4 kernel series is the most advanced long-term supported one, used in popular GNU/Linux operating systems like Ubuntu. Therefore it is imperative to get new maintenance updates that either patch security flaws discovered by various kernel hackers and developers, as well as to update drivers and introduce performance improvements and new features.
Two weeks passed since the launch of Linux kernel 4.4.16 LTS, and the new point release promises to change a total of 66 files, with 596 insertions and 256 deletions, according to the appended shortlog and the diff from the previous maintenance version. There are mostly updated drivers in Linux kernel 4.4.17 LTS, with a little bit of arch, filesystems, core networking, core kernel, and mm changes.
“I’m announcing the release of the 4.4.17 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade,” says Greg Kroah-Hartman. “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.”
Users are urged to update their systems immediately
Among the changes implemented in Linux kernel 4.4.17 LTS, we can notice updates to ATA, BCMA, CLK, DMA, hwtracing, I2C, input (touchscreen, mouse, joystick), networking, PINCTRL, PPS, s390, Xen, USB, TTY, SCSI, and SPI drivers, minor fixes to the eCryptfs, OverlayFS, NILFS2, and EXT4 filesystems, as well as to the x86 and ARC hardware architectures.
The networking stack received only a couple of enhancements, to the Ceph and Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) components. If you are using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.4 LTS series, you need to update to version 4.4.17 as soon as possible. To do that, check the repositories of your distribution for the updated kernel, or download the Linux kernel 4.4.17 LTS sources and compile it yourself.
Via Softpedia