Greg Kroah-Hartman just announced earlier today, February 26, 2016, the general availability of the third maintenance release in the stable, long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.4.3 LTS is a fully-loaded release that promises to add better support for various hardware architectures, among which we can mention ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), m32r, PowerPC, and x86. Multiple drivers have been updated as well, in particular for things like iiO, IOMMU (I/O Memory Management Unit), NVDIMM, Phy, SCSI, iSCSI, TTY, and USB.
But that's not all, as the third maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.4 LTS contains numerous core kernel changes, tools and mm improvements, as well as a handful of sound enhancements. In numbers, Linux kernel 4.4.3 changes a total of 140 files, with 1307 insertions and 585 deletions.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.3 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman in the release announcement. "The updated 4.4.y git tree 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 filesystems received improvements as well
Besides the arch, sound, mm, core kernel, and drivers updates, Linux kernel 4.4.3 LTS incorporates improvements to numerous Linux filesystems, among which we can mention Btrfs, XFS, CIFS, Devpts, EXT4, NFS, OverlayFS, procfs, and UDF. But there are many other small changes, so we recommend reading the appended shortlog for details.
In the meantime, OS vendors are urged to download the Linux kernel 4.4.3 LTS sources from either the kernel.org website or via Softpedia, compile it, tweak it for their GNU/Linux distribution, and push the new version to the main repositories for users to upgrade as soon as possible. Advanced Linux users can also update to Linux kernel 4.4.3 LTS manually.
