Linux Kernel 5.14 Reached End of Life, Users Urged to Upgrade to Linux 5.15 LTS

Linux Kernel 5.14 End

The time has come to say goodbye to another Linux kernel series, Linux 5.14, which is now end-of-life and it won’t receive further updates, so it’s time to upgrade to a newer kernel branch.

Linux kernel 5.14 was released almost three months ago, on August 30th, 2021, in celebration of Linux’s 30th anniversary, and it introduced quite some interesting features, starting with better protection against those pesky Spectre vulnerabilities and continuing with much-enhanced support for AMD GPUs.

Today, November 21st, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Linux kernel 5.14.21 as the twenty-first maintenance update and also the last in the series. Yes, that’s right, Linux 5.14 is now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website and it will no longer be supported.

“Note, this is the LAST 5.14.y kernel release. It is now end-of-life. Please move to the 5.15.y kernel branch at this point in time,” said Greg Kroah-Hartman in a mailing list announcement.

The good news, however, is that you’ll be upgrading to the recently released Linux 5.15 kernel, which is an LTS (Long-Term Support) series supported for at least a couple of years, until Octomber 2023.

Fun fact: all supported kernels are now LTS.

Linux kernel 5.15 brings lots of goodies over Linux kernel 5.14, such as a brand-new and fully functional NTFS file system implementation, an in-kernel SMB server, realtime preemption locking, new Btrfs features, per-VLAN multicast support, support for Nintendo Wii consoles, a new gpio-virtio driver, DAMON (Data Access MONitor), and many other goodies to play with.

Without further ado, if your GNU/Linux distribution is using Linux kernel 5.14, you should consider upgrading to Linux kernel 5.15 as soon as possible. If you can’t do it yourself, you should ask the maintainers of your distribution to upgrade the kernel packages to the latest Linux 5.15 point release.

Last updated 2 years ago

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