Today, June 24, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the general availability of the third maintenance release for the Linux 4.6 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.6.3 is here two weeks after the release of the second maintenance update in the series, Linux kernel 4.6.2, to change a total of 88 files, with 1302 insertions and 967 deletions. Unfortunately, very few GNU/Linux distributions have adopted the Linux 4.6 series, despite the fact that Greg Kroah-Hartman urged everyone to move to this most advanced kernel branch as soon as possible from Linux 4.5, which reached end of life.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.6.3 kernel. All users of the 4.6 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.6.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.6.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."
Here's what's new in Linux kernel 4.6.3
Looking at the appended shortlog, we can notice that Linux kernel 4.6.3 brings multiple improvements to various hardware architectures, including SPARC, ARM64 (AArch64), ARM, PA-RISC, s390, PowerPC (PPC), and x86, an updated networking stack with many changes for the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, but also for things like L2TP, Netfilter, Netlink, TIPC, Wireless, Bridge, and switchdev.
A couple of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), mm, eCryptfs, Crypto, and Intel HDA fixes are also present in Linux kernel 4.6.3, along with updated drivers, in particular networking ones (mostly Ethernet Atheros/Marvell/EZchip/Rocker/STMicroelectronics), but also general-purpose input/output (GPIO), Intel i915, PINCTRL, and SCSI. All users are urged to update to Linux kernel 4.6.3 as soon as possible.
