After a very busy cycle due to the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, which were publicly disclosed earlier this year and later discovered to put billions of devices using modern processors at risk of attacks, the Linux 4.15 kernel series was released at the of January heavily redesign against two critical hardware bugs.
Now, nearly three months and only eighteen maintenance updates later, the Linux 4.15 kernel series reached end of life and it will no longer receive support. As such, all those using a kernel from the Linux 4.15 branch on their GNU/Linux distributions are urged to upgrade to the latest Linux 4.16 kernel series as soon as possible.
While the Linux 4.15 kernel series included Spectre and Meltdown mitigations for the 64-bit and 32-bit hardware architectures, the recently released Linux kernel 4.16 branch appears to be fully patched against those nasty vulnerabilities, bringing support for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and IBM System z (s390) hardware.
Besides that, Linux kernel 4.16 comes with numerous updated and new drivers to support the latest hardware components and devices, so those with modern computers must upgrade to it immediately.
Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/linux-kernel-4-15-reached-end-of-life-users-urged-to-move-to-linux-4-16-now-520787.shtml
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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