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Renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the end of life (EOL) for the Linux 6.7 kernel series, urging users to upgrade to the latest Linux 6.8 kernel as soon as possible.
Linux kernel 6.7 was released by Linus Torvalds on January 7th, 2024, and introduced exciting new features like the bcachefs file system, a copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux-based operating systems designed to compete with the modern features offered by the Btrfs and ZFS filesystems.
Linux 6.7 also introduced support for NVIDIA’s GSP firmware in the Nouveau open-source graphics driver, new features for the Btrfs file system, improvements for the EXT4 file system, a bunch of networking enhancements, as well as numerous new and updated drivers for better hardware support.
After only twelve maintenance updates, the Linux 6.7 kernel series is now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website, which means that it will no longer receive bug and security fixes. Users who use Linux kernel 6.7 are now urged to upgrade to Linux kernel 6.8 releases.
Linux kernel 6.8 was released last month on March 10th, 2024, with new features like LAM (Linear Address Masking) virtualization support for KVM, a new Intel Xe DRM driver, fscrypt support for CephFS, a multi-size THP (Transparent Huge Pages) sysfs interface, and more.
Linux 6.8 is already powering various popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it will be the default kernel in the upcoming Fedora Linux 40 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS releases.
Linux kernel 6.8 was also updated today to version 6.8.3, which will soon make its way into the stable software repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions. Linux kernel 6.8.3 includes quite some changes with 4772 insertions and 2551 deletions in 481 changed files, so it’s a highly recommended update.
However, I should warn you that while Linux 6.8 comes with bleeding-edge features, it will also be short-lived and supported for only a couple of months. Therefore, if you’re looking for long-term support for your kernel, you should consider moving to one of the many LTS kernel series, Linux 6.6 LTS being the latest, which will be supported until December 2026.
Last updated 4 weeks ago
