We reported earlier today, December 15, that renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the end of life for the Linux 4.2 kernel series, urging users to upgrade to the 4.3 branch of the Linux kernel.

A few hours after Greg Kroah-Hartman's announcement, Canonical's Kamal Mostafa was pleased to inform users of the Ubuntu Linux operating system that the Ubuntu Kernel Team will continue maintaining the Linux 4.2 kernel series for their GNU/Linux operating system.

"Canonical's kernel team will pick up stable maintenance where Greg KH left off with v4.2.8 (thanks, Greg!)," said Kamal Mostafa, Ubuntu Kernel Team, Canonical Ltd. "Our linux-4.2.y{-queue,-review} stable branches will fork from v4.2.8 and will be published here: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/linux.git."

As you might know, Canonical currently uses the Linux 4.2 kernel in the latest stable release of Ubuntu Linux, the Wily Werewolf (a.k.a. Ubuntu 15.10), so they have to keep maintaining it and release updates to users from time to time when regressions and security flaws are found.

Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel Team promises to maintain the Linux 4.2 kernel until August 2016, as the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system will reach end of life on July 2016. They will try to use the same stable review and request workflow, as well as to follow the standard upstream rules for the stable Linux kernels.

Therefore, to show their dedication, the Ubuntu Kernel Team announced today the first release based on the Linx kernel 4.2.8 version published earlier on the kernel.org website. The Linux 4.2.8-ckt1 kernel packages for Ubuntu 15.10 will be available next week. More details can be found at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable.