How to Install Linux Kernel 4.8 in Ubuntu / Linux Mint

Linux Kernel 4.8 was released yesterday and Ubuntu Kernel Team has made the binary packages.

Linus Torvalds announced:

So the last week was really quiet, which maybe means that I could probably just have skipped rc8 after all. Oh well, no real harm done.

This obviously means that the merge window for 4.9 is open, and I appreciate the people who already sent in some pull requests early due to upcoming travel or other reasons. I’ll start pulling things tomorrow, and have even the most eager developers and testers hopefully test the final 4.8 release before the next development kernels start coming 😉

Anyway, there’s a few stragging fixes since rc8 listed below: it’s a mixture of arch fixes (arm, mips, sparc, x86), drivers (networking, nvdimm, gpu) and generic code (some core networking, with a few filesystem, cgroup and and vm things).

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Linux Kernel 4.8 main features:

• AMD GPU OverDrive Support
• Initial NVIDIA Pascal Support
• HDMI CEC framework
• Raspberry Pi 3 SoC support
• A a big rework on the Btrfs file-system
• And other security improvements.

How to install Kernel 4.8:

The cloud, lowlatency, and generic builds of Linux 4.8 for Ubuntu based systems are available for download at the link:

Download Kernel 4.8 (.debs)

Just download and click install following packages one by one:

1. linux-headers-4.8.0-040800_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_all.deb
2. linux-headers-4.8.0-040800-generic/cloud/lowlatency_4.8.0-xxx_amd64/i386/.deb
3. linux-image-4.8.0-040800-generic/cloud/lowlatency_4.8.0-xxx_amd64/i386.deb

For Ubuntu Server without GUI, run commands below one by one to download and install the packages:

For 64-bit system:

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800-generic_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_amd64.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-image-4.8.0-040800-generic_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i linux-*.deb

For 32-bit system:

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800-generic_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_i386.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-image-4.8.0-040800-generic_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_i386.deb


sudo dpkg -i linux-*.deb

How to Restore:

You can easily restore to the previous Kernel by reboot, and in Grub boot-loader select Advanced Options for Ubuntu-> old kernel entries.

Once you login Ubuntu with the previous Kernel, use the command below to remove old kernels:

sudo apt install byobu && sudo purge-old-kernels