All Linux kernel 3.18 users are urged to upgrade

Feb 27, 2015 19:48 GMT  ·  By

Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure to announce a new maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.18 kernel, which brings a handful of improvements in various areas, including IPv6, IPv4, EXT4, as well as the Broadcom Ethernet driver.

According to the raw changelog, Linux kernel 3.18.8 fixes CPU unplug issues, fixes netxen_nic_poll() logic, now initializes unicast_sock sk_pacing_rate on IPv4, removes the awful unicast_sock on IPv4, repairs a panic in rate estimators, and it now ignores journal checksum on remount on EXT4 file systems.

“I'm announcing the release of the 3.18.8 kernel. All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 3.18.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,” says Greg Kroah-Hartman in the mailinglist announcement.

In addition, Linux kernel 3.18.8 no longer sends PTB (Packet Too Big) messages for MTU smaller than 1280 on IPv6, fixes the processing in netvsc_send() error, fixes socket skipping within chain, and fixes the passing of wrong parameter header to param_type2af in sctp_process_param.

As usual, if your GNU/Linux operating system uses a kernel from the 3.18 series, you should update it to version 3.18.8 as soon as it is available in the main software repositories of the distribution. If you can’t wait and have some knowledge about kernel compiling, you can download the Linux 3.18.8 kernel sources right now from Softpedia.