One of Raspberry Pi's engineers, and also a moderator of the official Raspberry Pi forum, announced recently that the default firmware branch of the world's most known single-computer board (SBC) has been updated from the 3.18 kernel series to the more recent Linux kernel 4.0 branch.

Users are being informed that the source tree of Linux kernel 4.0 has been available for a awhile now, used by various Linux distributions supporting Raspberry Pi computer board, including the well-known OpenELEC.

The good news is that Linux kernel 4.0 brings support for more hardware, such as WiFi and DVB USB devices. All users can update the Raspberry Pi's default firmware to Linux kernel 4.0 by running the following command:

code sudo rpi-update

Raspberry Pi's default firmware will be rebased on Linux kernel 4.1 soon

In more good news for Raspberry Pi users, it would appear that there's now a Linux kernel 4.1 tree that currently acts as a testbed for experimental kernel commits. Soon, the default firmware will be rebased on Linux 4.1 kernel.

All Raspberry Pi users are urged to report any regressions they might find with Linux kernel 4.0, especially when compared to the Linux 3.18 kernel series. To test, run the "sudo apt-get upgrade" command in a terminal emulator.

Raspbian, the free Linux kernel-based operating system derived from Debian GNU/Linux and optimized for the Raspberry Pi single-computer board, will soon get new images that contain the Linux 4.0 kernel.