Linux Kernel 5.17 became the shortest-lived series. It was released on March 20th and now it is marked as the end of life on kernel.org. This means the version will not receive maintenance updates from now on, including security updates. Users are urged to upgrade to Linux Kernel 5.18 immediately.
Shortest-lived kernel series
The announcement came along with the latest maintenance update, Linux Kernel 5.17.15, which is also the last one. There are still many GNU/Linux distributions using Linux Kernel 5.17. There are even some distros that couldn’t upgrade to Linux Kernel 5.17 yet. Distribution maintainers are urged to upgrade to the 5.18 kernel series now.
Linux Kernel 5.18 was also updated to version 5.18.4. Linux Kernel 5.18 came with various important features, such as user events support in the tracing system, 64-bit integrity checksums support on NVMe devices, and improved scheduling performance on AMD Zen processors. Users or developers who don’t want to upgrade Linux Kernel frequently can switch to a long-term-support branch, such as Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS. Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Kernel developer said,
« This is the LAST 5.17.y kernel release. This kernel branch is now end-of-life. Please move to 5.18.y at this point in time, no more new updates will happen on this kernel branch at all. »