Renowned kernel developer and maintainer Ben Hutchings announced on November 17, 2015, the immediate availability of the seventy-three maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel series.

Looking at the appended diff from the previous maintenance release, version 3.2.72, Linux kernel 3.2.73 LTS is here to add various improvements to the x86, MIPS, m68k, and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, fix various crypto-related issues, introduce some sound and mm enhancements, as well as to update the networking stack, especially for the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols.

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.2.73 kernel. All users of the 3.2 kernel series should upgrade," said Ben Hutchings. "The updated 3.2.y git tree can be found at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.2.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser at https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git."

Numerous drivers have been updated

Like any other kernel maintenance release, Linux kernel 3.2.73 LTS updates numerous drivers, especially for things like Nouveau, InfiniBand (IB), IOMMU (I/O Memory Management Unit), MD-RAID, MTD, networking (mostly Wireless drivers, but also USB and PPP ones), SCSI, iiO, TTY, and USB. Additionally, the CIFS (Common Internet File System) and NFS (Network File System) filesystems have also received updates.

All users of GNU/Linux operating systems powered by kernel packages from the Linux 3.2 LTS series are urged to update their installations to the Linux kernel 3.2.73 LTS maintenance release as soon as possible, or more precisely as soon as the update arrives in the default software repositories of their distributions. Don't forget to restart your computers once the kernel update has been applied.

Alternatively, experienced users and OS vendors can download the Linux kernel 3.2.73 LTS sources right now from the kernel.org website or via Softpedia and start compiling the kernel by hand.