Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/884787/

Linus Torvalds released
the 4.4 kernel on January 10, 2016 and promptly left the building for
the greener fields of 4.5. This kernel was finished from his point of
view, but it was just beginning its life in the wider world, and became the
first long-term-stable release to be supported for more than two years.
Indeed, the 4.4 release became one of the longest-supported and most widely
used releases in the history of the kernel project (so far); it was
deployed in vast numbers of Android devices, among other places. The final 4.4 stable
release took place on February 3, over six years after 4.4 was
“finished”; it is time to take a look at what happened to 4.4 in its
stable life.