Famous Linux Kernel Developer and Administrator Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the end of the life cycle of the Linux Kernel 4.20 series, urging users to upgrade to a new kernel as soon as possible.
Released on December 23, 2018, the Linux Kernel 4.20 series brought with it a ton of improvements, including fixes to the Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB) using task control, and mitigations for attacks related to the Specter vulnerability.
In addition, it introduced better protection against Specter variant 2 vulnerability, better protection for Specter variant 4 on ARM64 (AArch64) processors, support for AMD Radeon Pro Vega graphics cards, support for the C-SKY processor architecture, as well as support for Hygon Dhyana x86 and AMD Radeon Picasso processors and Raven 2 graphics cards.
But since all good things have to end, Linux Kernel 4.20 reaches the end of its life with this latest update, Linux Kernel 4.20.17, which means that there will be no more updates for this series. Now the chosen distribution is Linux Kernel 5.0.
Upgrade to Linux Kernel 5.0 now
If you are using a Linux 4.20 series kernel in your distribution, there are currently two choices, upgrade to the latest version, Linux Kernel 4.20.17 or upgrade to Linux Kernel 5.0. If Linux Kernel 5.0 is not available in your distribution's repositories, it is best to upgrade to a compatible long-term support (LTS) kernel.
Linux Kernel series with LTS support include Linux 4.19 (recommended), Linux 4.14, Linux 4.9, Linux 4.4, and Linux 3.16. But We recommend upgrading to Linux Kernel 5.0 as soon as possible.