Today, August 10, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the sixth maintenance update to the Linux 4.6 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.6.6 is here two weeks after the release of the fifth maintenance version in the series, bringing changes for a total of 90 files, with 920 insertions and 462 deletions. It appears to be a normal kernel update that patches various security flaws discovered recently by various kernel developers and hackers, as well as to update drivers and implement various other needed features.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.6.6 kernel. All users of the 4.6 kernel series must upgrade," says 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 4.6.6
According to the appended shortlog and the diff from Linux kernel 4.6.5 released on July 27, 2016, we can notice that the sixth maintenance update of Linux kernel 4.6 introduces small fixes to the ARC, MIPS, and x86 hardware architectures, multiple core kernel and mm improvements, an updated networking stack with Ceph, wireless, and Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) changes, as well as improvements to the eCryptfs and EXT4 filesystems.
Among the updated drivers, we can mention those for ATA, BCMA, CLK, CPUFreq, DMA, hwtracing, I2C, input (new mouse, joystick, and touchscreen drivers), networking, PINCTRL, PPS, s390, USB, SCSI, SPI, TTY, and Xen devices. If you're using a GNU/Linux distribution powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.6 series, we recommend that you update to today's Linux kernel 4.6.6 release as soon as possible. The Linux kernel 4.6.6 sources are available for download right now via our website or from kernel.org.
