New Kernels: 4.14.124, 4.19.49, 5.1.8 and 5.2-RC4. And as always, You Must Upgrade NOW
Stable branch kernels 4.14.124, 4.19.49 and 5.1.8 as well as a release candidate 5.2-rc4 for the upcoming 5.2 was released today. The kernels come with the "All users must upgrade" notice which has been attached to all the latest kernel releases. And there is, as always no indication or even a hint as to why we "must" upgrade NOW.
It is starting to remind us of the fable about the boy who cried wolf. There were demands that you "must upgrade" attached to the release of kernels 5.1.7, 5.0.21 and 4.19.48 and the release of 5.1.6, 5.0.20, 5.14.123, 4.19.47 and 4.9.180. This makes it the third time in a row that there is a "All users must upgrade" notice attached [1][2][3] to stable-series kernel releases.
Greg Kroah-Hartman does not simply slam demands that you Must Upgrade Now on kernels without having a very good reason. Those notices have typically been an exception, not the norm. It appears that such notices are becoming a new normal and that is not a good thing. Some information from the kernel community explaining why a notice like that is there would also be nice. We can plainly see that there are many KVM-related fixes for PowerPC in the changelog for kernel 5.1.8. That's not something that would make anyone not using PowerPC rush to upgrade. That is just one example, we are not saying that's why the Greg demands that you must upgrade NOW. We have no idea why those messages were attached and nothing in the changelogs for these kernels jumps out at us.
There was of course no new 5.0 series kernel this round. It's over, Linux 5.0 is Finished and officially declared EOL (End-Of-Life).
You can read the full changelog's for the stable kernels here:
- https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/ChangeLog-5.1.8
- https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.19.49
- https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.14.124
New 5.2 release candidate[edit]
There's also a forth release-candidate for the exciting new 5.2 kernel released today. That's a day early. Linus Torvalds assures us he is not confused and does, in fact, know what day it is.
"No, I'm not confused, and I haven't lost track of what day it is, I do actually know that it's still Saturday here, not Sunday, and I'm just doing rc4 a bit early because I'll be on an airplane during my normal release time."
He goes on to day that this is a pretty normal release candidate release:
"You can use interdiff to skip the SPDX stuff if you really want to, and if you do, you'll see the usual arch updates (arm64, mips, parisc, nds32) various random drivers updates (gpu stands out, some rdma), networking fixes, filesystems (ceph, ovlfs, xfs). And misc other stuff."
The source is, as always, available at kernel.org. You could also use this direct link: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-5.2-rc4.tar.gz
notes[edit]
- ↑ The Greg on LKML: Linux 5.1.8. I'm announcing the release of the 5.1.8 kernel. All users of the 5.1 kernel series must upgrade.
- ↑ The Greg on LKML: Linux 4.19.49 I'm announcing the release of the 4.19.49 kernel. All users of the 4.19 kernel series must upgrade.
- ↑ The Greg on LKML: Linux 4.14.124 I'm announcing the release of the 4.14.124 kernel. All users of the 4.14 kernel series must upgrade.
- ↑ LKML: Linus Torvalds - Linux 5.2-rc4
published 2019-06-09 - last edited 2019-06-17
Enable comment auto-refresher