How to find out when a kernel update was released

Question

I can see this is the latest kernel for Ubuntu 14.04:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/linux-image-3.13.0-37-generic

But, surprisingly, I cannot see anywhere exactly which day it was released on. Is there a way to discover that? Or is there an apt-get or similar command I can run? (I am hoping I can find this out without installing or downloading the package.)

Answer 1

In terms of just tracking what's available, if you can rely on your local repositories to do the work for you, it's quite easy. You can just use apt-cache to see what the current linux-image-generic meta-package points at. I've fluffed it up so it just returns the kernel version.

sudo apt-get update
apt-cache depends linux-image-generic | sed -n '2s/.*: //p'

Finding out the package date is a little harder. And more manual.

• Stick the version on the end of: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/trusty/+package/
  Eg: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/trusty/+package/linux-image-3.13.0-37-generic
• Find your build. Probably from the security repo. That takes you here.
• Look in the Downloadable Files section for something that ends "produced these files". That'll take you to the build information page.

• And that's where you find:

  Started on 2014-09-22
  Finished on 2014-09-23 (took 2 hours, 21 minutes, 32.7 seconds)

Pretty exhausting for an otherwise dull bit of information. It's easier to just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

It'll upgrade the kernel if there's a newer version available.

Answer 2

You can check in this PPA the kernels for each Ubuntu release.

Hope it helps