Linux Kernel 3.7.9 has just been released and this brief tutorial shows you how to upgrade your current kernel version in Ubuntu 12.10 or previous. This is a maintenance release to fix  a serious issue with Samsung laptops platform drivers designed to run under BIOS and EFI which causes the make to become bricked, clean up PME state when removing a device and other bugs.

For a more detailed changelog, please click here.

Below are some of the changes that were added in this release:

  • Clear EFI_RUNTIME_SERVICES rather than EFI_BOOT by "noefi" boot parameter
  • Clean up PME state when removing a device
  • Fix to not assume %ds is usable in xen_iret for 32-bit PVOPS
  • Check if PUD is large when validating a kernel address
  • Work around boot failure on HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Server systems

And a patch that does not leak kernel page mapping location. Without this patch, it would be trivial to determine the kernel page mappings by examining the error code reported in dmesg.

To get started upgrading your kernel, press Ctrl – Alt – T on your keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below to change into the Downloads folder of home directory.

cd ~/Downloads

 

Next, run the commands below to download the 32-bit version of the kernel headers and images.

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-headers-3.7.9-030709-generic_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_i386.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-headers-3.7.9-030709_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_all.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-image-3.7.9-030709-generic_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_i386.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-image-extra-3.7.9-030709-generic_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_i386.deb

 

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Next, run the commands below to install / upgrade the kernel.

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

 

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Finally, run the commands below to update grub.

 

sudo update-grub2

 

For the 64-bit kernel headers and images, run the

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-headers-3.7.9-030709-generic_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_amd64.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-headers-3.7.9-030709_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_all.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-image-3.7.9-030709-generic_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_amd64.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.7.9-raring/linux-image-extra-3.7.9-030709-generic_3.7.9-030709.201302171607_amd64.deb

 

Enjoy!

 

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