After a few weeks from its official release, it finally happened, Linux kernel 4.7 has just landed in the stable software repositories of the popular, lightweight and highly customizable Arch Linux operating system.
Linux kernel 4.7 is the most stable and advanced kernel branch, and only a few GNU/Linux distributions have adopted since its launch on July 24, 2016. It's still marked as "mainline" not "stable" or "longterm" on the kernel.org website, which means that it didn't receive a maintenance update at the moment of writing this article.
As for its new features, Linux kernel 4.7 comes with an updated AMDGPU graphics driver with support for AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs, LoadPin, a brand new security module that ensures all modules loaded by the kernel originate from the same filesystem, and support for upgrading firmware using the EFI "Capsule" mechanism.
Linux kernel 4.7 also marks the sync_file fencing mechanism used in the Android mobile operating system as stable and ready for production, implements support for generating virtual USB Device Controllers in USB/IP, supports parallel directory lookups, and introduces the "schedutil" frequency governor, which is faster and more accurate than the current ones.
Arch Linux users can now upgrade to Linux kernel 4.7
If you're using the Arch Linux operating system on your desktop or server machines, we are happy to inform you that you can now install the Linux 4.7 kernel. The new kernel packages have hit the stable channels just a few minutes ago at the moment of writing this article, and it'a availabe for both 64- and 32-bit hardware architectures.
Arch Linux power users most probably have spotted the update and are now enjoying the new features of Linux kernel 4.7 on their systems, but if you're new to Arch Linux and don't know what to do to update the kernel packages, just open the Terminal app and type the "sudo pacman -Syu" command. Once the installation has finished, reboot the PC.
