When we talk about the kernel, basically we are talking about the heart of a GNU/LINUX system. Being a little more technical, it can be said that the Kernel is the main responsible for providing the different programs with secure access to the computer hardware or, in a basic way, is responsible for the management of resources, through the system call services.
Among the basic and general functions of a kernel, we have:
- The communication between the programs that request resources and the hardware.
- Management of the different computer programs (tasks) of a machine.
- Hardware management (memory, processor, peripheral, storage, etc.)
In GNU/LINUX the kernel is called Linux and its development is maintained by the large community of developers from all over the world, who provide valuable lines of code from their free time or for work.However its development can be followed on a daily basis in the Linux Mailing List Kernel archive.
This month, the Linux Kernel version 4.17 has been released With a lot of new things as always:
- Includes support for AMD’s Radeon Vega 12 graphics processor.
- POWER4 CPU compatibility
- More protection for Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities
- F2FS incorporates performance enhancements and AIO support without waiting
- Includes EXT4 protection against maliciously created images
- Improves performance with lower energy consumption
- Support for 8 obsolete architectures is removed
It’s an important version but not enough to be called 5.0 and that’s what Linus Torvalds said:
“No, I didn’t call it 5.0, even though the whole numerology of the git object count was in place. It will happen in the not too distant future, and I was told that all the release scripts on kernel.org are ready for it, but I didn’t feel there was a real reason for it, …. I suspect that around point 4.20, which is that I run out of fingers to keep track of minor pitches, and so start to get very confused, I will change.”
Let’s get to work
We will proceed to install Kernel 4.17 through precompiled.DEB packages that will make the process relatively simple.
Note: In this tutorial everything has been tested step by step, but problems can always happen. So if you have a stable Ubuntu 18.04 and don’t need a critical kernel update, it would be best to think twice.
The first thing we have to do is to get the necessary packages, so we go to this page where the required.DEB are located.
And in it we will choose the following packages:
- Linux-Headers
- Linux-Modules
- Linux-Image
If we want the normal kernel we will choose the ones that contain the words Generic so they can be 32 bits or 64 bits according to our distribution.
To download them through the terminal would be with the following commands:
          wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.17/linux-headers-4.17.0-041700_4.17.0-041700.201806041953_all.deb
Then we proceed with the modules:
          wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.17/linux-modules-4.17.0-041700-generic_4.17.0-041700.201806041953_amd64.deb
And finally the kernel itself:
         wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.17/linux-image-unsigned-4.17.0-041700-generic_4.17.0-041700.201806041953_amd64.deb
Then we will proceed to install each of the downloaded packages:
sudo dpkg -i linux-*.deb
After the installation and noticing that there are no errors, we must reboot with the new kernel.
We open a terminal and write:
uname -r
Finally we check that we are using the new Kernel 4.17 in our ubuntu 18.04
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