14 DAY TRIAL // The second maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel has been announced earlier today, February 17, 2016, by renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman.
It appears that Linux kernel 4.4.2 LTS has a significant amount of improvements and fixes. Let's start with the architecture updates, as the PA-RISC and x86 ones received some small fixes, and the filesystems changes, especially for EXT4, NFS, and OCFS2.
Then, there are multiple crypto updates, along with some core kernel and mm enhancements. Numerous sound changes have been added as well in this second maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.4.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.2 kernel. All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.4.y git tree 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."
Several drivers have been updated
Besides the architectures, sound, and core kernel improvements, Linux kernel 4.4.2 LTS updated several drivers, in particular for things like ATA, block, crypto, HID, IOMMU, MD, MTD, PCI, networking (mostly wireless), TTY, and USB.
As expected, users of GNU/Linux distributions powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 series are urged to update to the 4.4.2 release as soon as possible, or as soon as the new version lands in the main software repos of the respective OS.
We're urging OS vendors and maintainers to grab the Linux kernel 4.4.2 LTS sources directly from the kernel.org website or via Softpedia, compile it and tweak it for their distributions, and then push it to the repos for users to upgrade.