Linux Kernel 4.8.5 Lands with Numerous CIFS, ARM64, and PowerPC Improvements

Linux kernel 4.8.5 is here less than a week after the announcement of the fourth maintenance update to the Linux 4.8 kernel series, which is currently the most stable and advanced you can get for a GNU/Linux distribution, and, according to the appended shortlog and the diff from the previous release, it’s a pretty big one, changing a total of 152 files, with 1416 insertions and 612 deletions. Taking a quick look at the changes implemented in the Linux 4.8.5 kernel update, we can notice that there are multiple improvements to the ARM64 (AArch64), PowerPC (PPC), and x86 hardware architectures, along with minor changes to MIPS, PA-RISC, ARC, s390, and METAg. There are also numerous enhancements to the CIFS file system, as well as to NFS, Ceph, ISOFS, JBD2, OverlayFS, and CryptoFS.