Linux Kernel 4.4.42 LTS Updates USB Drivers, Improves ARM64 Support

If you’re reading our reports on the latest Linux kernels, you should already be aware of the fact that Linux 4.4 is an LTS (Long Term Support) branch, used in various popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Arch Linux, and the security-oriented Alpine Linux. The new version, Linux kernel 4.4.42 LTS, it’s pretty hefty and changes a total of 92 files, with 903 insertions and 410 deletions. Looking at the appended shortlog, we can notice that the biggest part of the Linux kernel 4.4.42 LTS update are various improvements to the USB drivers, but there’s also some changes for hwmon, IOMMU, Radeon, CLK, IRQ Chip, SCSI, PCI, MD, MMC, wireless, and Ethernet ones. Other than that, there are some ARM64/AArch64 improvements, along with small fixes to the ARM, x86, CRIS, MIPS, and s390 architectures.