http://news.softpedia.com/news/linu...ow-for-linux-kernel-4-3-now-open-490444.shtml Linus Torvalds announces Linux kernel 4.2 After eight Release Candidate builds, just a few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds had announced the release and immediate availability for download of the final version of Linux kernel 4.2. We remind you that Linux kernel 4.2 is one of the biggest kernels in recent times, as Mr. Torvalds wrote back when the first RC version was announced. It introduces all sorts of interesting things, such as rewrites of Intel Assembly x86 code, support for a new ARM board, F2FS per-file encryption, NCQ TRIM handling, Jitter RNG improvements, an all-new AMD GPU driver, queue spinlocks, and many other updated drivers and performance improvements. "So judging by how little happened this week, it wouldn't have been a mistake to release 4.2 last week after all, but hey, there's certainly a few fixes here, and it's not like delaying 4.2 for a week should have caused any problems either," says Linus Torvalds. "So here it is, and the merge window for 4.3 is now open. I already have a few pending early pull requests, but as usual I'll start processing them tomorrow and give the release some time to actually sit." Linux kernel 4.2 now ready for download As usual, you can download the Linux kernel 4.2 sources right now from the kernel.orgwebsite or via Softpedia and start compiling it on your GNU/Linux distribution, that if you know how to do it. If not, we strongly recommend that you wait for your operating system's vendor to upgrade the kernel packages to version 4.2, which might take a few weeks or even months. Of course, we also urge all maintainers of Linux kernel-based operating systems to download the latest Linux 4.2 kernel announced today and try to compile, test, and ultimately upgrade the current kernel packages of their distributions to the new version, which brings support for new hardware components and promises to offer a more reliable and secure system.
From a security perspective there is one interesting commit in kernel 4.2. which hasn't been mentioned in most reports: From now on it's possible in the Linux Security Module (LSM) to use several security frameworks (SELinux, Smack, Tomoyo and Apparmor) at the same time. In the past this was only possible for the Yama LSM which isn't enabled in all distros, though. Yama is enabled in the Arch Linux kernel (CONFIG_SECURITY_YAMA=y and CONFIG_SECURITY_YAMA_STACKED=y) while it's not enabled, e.g., in the kernels of Fedora and Debian. You can see this in chrome://sandbox in Chromium/Google Chrome. The new patch allows for a more flexible stacking of different security frameworks. More details here and here. We'll see what will come out of it. I don't think that, say, AppArmor and SELinux will be used in parallel as there will be too many conflicts. But in the comments in the first LWN article somebody writes that there is a lot of academic work on out-of-tree LSMs. Now it might be easier to push them to the kernel.
