Kernel 4.0.5 has been released, being the most advanced stable kernel available.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced Kernel 4.0.5, a kernel patch that bring architecture updates for ARM, x86, MIPS, PowerPC, s390, ARM64, and PA-RISC, filesystem specific optimizations for Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, OverlayFS, jbd2, Optimized MPEG Filesystem (OMFS), and NFS and updated drivers, among others.
As a reminder, Kernel 4.0 brought the long awaited Life Patching feature, which permits the users to update the kernel without having to reboot the system. While this is not important for regular users, this feature is very good for Linux servers.
Because it has been already adopted by many Linux distributions, the developers will most likely make it a LTS version.
Installation instructions:
The ElRepo repository provides the latest stable version of the kernel for CentOS 7, Enterprise Linux 7 and RHEL 7.
In order to install the kernel patch, you need to add the repository’s key to your system, install the repository and enable the repo and install the kernel-ml package:
$ su root
# rpm --import https://www.elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
# yum install http://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-7.0-2.el7.elrepo.noarch.rpm
# yum --enablerepo=elrepo-kernel install kernel-ml
Reboot and choose Kernel 4.0.5 at startup:
# reboot
Optional, to remove kernel 4.0.5, do:
# yum remove kernel-ml