Following some initial hiccups, the open source community has now got much stability on the 4.8 series through Linux 4.8.7. The new kernel update includes a large number of driver updates to improve the user experience.
“I am announcing the release of the 4.8.7 kernel. All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade,” Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in a community email.
The latest Linux kernel includes as many as 122 file changes along with 1,096 insertions and 541 deletions. There are updated drivers for Intel and Radeon GPUs and tweaks to support ARM, ARM64, h8300, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC (PPC), s390 and x86 architectures. Additionally, the platform comes with improvements to the Btrfs, NFS, OverlayFS, UBIFS and XFS filesystems and fixes for various wireless modems.
Linux 4.4.31 LTS also emerged
Apart from the 4.8.7 kernel, Kroah-Hartman has released Linux 4.4.31 LTS. This version changes 67 files and includes updated drivers for hardware with Android, FireWire, HID, HV, I2C, MD, MMC, MTD, PWM, SCSI, TTY, USB and virtio. It also comes with updated sound and networking stacks.
You can download the updated Linux versions on your system directly from the kernel.org website.
