It looks like renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman is on vacation, as Sasha Levin had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today, February 16, 2016, the general availability of the eighteenth maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.1 LTS.
Being a long-term supported kernel branch, Linux 4.1 will receive updates and patches for a few more years, and today's maintenance build proves that the kernel developers are committed to keeping the series stable and reliable for all GNU/Linux operating systems that use it. Linux kernel 4.1.18 LTS is a massive release with a total of 228 files changes, consisting of 5304 insertions and 1128 deletions.
What's new in Linux kernel 4.1.18 LTS? Well, let's start with improvements for the ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), MIPS, PA-RISC, m32r, PowerPC (PPC), s390, and x86 hardware architectures, enhancements to the Btrfs, CIFS, NFS, XFS, OCFS2, OverlayFS, and UDF filesystems, networking stack fixes, especially for mac80211, as well as multiple core, crypto, and mm improvements and sound updates.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.1.18 kernel. All users of the 4.1 kernel series must upgrade," said Sasha Levin. "The updated 4.1.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.1.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."
Numerous drivers have been updated
Besides the architectures, filesystems, sound, networking, crypto, mm, and core kernel improvements, Linux kernel 4.1.18 LTS updates numerous drivers for better hardware support, in particular for things like Bluetooth, DMA, EDAC, GPU (mostly Radeon and Intel i915), InfiniBand, IOMMU, IRQchip, MD, MMC, DVB, networking (mostly wireless), PCI, SCSI, USB, thermal, staging, TTY, and Virtio.
As usual, we're urging all users of Linux kernel-based operating systems that use kernel packages from the Linux 4.1 LTS series to update to today's 4.1.18 release as soon as possible, either by installing the update from the default software repositories or by manually compiling the sources, which you can download right now from the kernel.org website or via Softpedia.
