Linux 3.12 has received the 64th maintenance update to its long-term supported kernel. This new LTS update comes just a day after Linus Torvalds officially announced Linux kernel 4.8.
As stated by Linux developer Jiri Slaby, Linux kernel 3.12.64 brings a big patch of total 135 files, 924 insertions and 481 deletions. It comes with security fixes and major updates to networking stack. Also, there are several hardware architecture improvements.
The latest Linux 3.12 version has hardware architecture improvements for systems powered by Alpha, ARC, ARM64, AVR32, ARM, CRIS, Blackfin, FR-V, Hexagon, RA64, MetaG, MicroBlaze, MIPS, MN10300, OpenRISC, PA-RISC, PowerPC, s390, SPARC, SH and x86. Additionally, there are fixes to various issues for EXT4, UBIFS and NFS filesystems.
Slaby’s team has also brought numerous changes to IPv6 and IPv4 protocols, Netfilter, mac80211 wireless framework and IrDA components. Likewise, the update includes better support for USB, SCSI, ISDN, EDAC, ACPI and GPIO devices.
It is worth noting here that the Linux 3.12 series has received the fresh update almost a year after the last release, and the Linux Foundation will support the kernel till the end of 2017. SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 1 is one of the popular distributions based on Linux kernel 3.12.
Users running Linux distro powered by the kernel from 3.12 series are recommended to upgrade to 3.12.64 LTS. The sources are available on the official kernel website.
