2018-07-27 In Site news.

We'd like to announce several small changes to the way Linux tarballs are produced.

Mainline release tarball signatures Starting with the 4.18 final release, all mainline tarball PGP signatures will be made by Greg Kroah-Hartman instead of Linus Torvalds. The main goal behind this change is to simplify the verification process and make all kernel tarball releases available for download on kernel.org be signed by the same developer. Linus Torvalds will continue to PGP-sign all tags in the mainline git repository. They can be verified using the git verify-tag command.

Sunsetting .gz tarball generation We stopped creating .bz2 copies of tarball releases 5 years ago, and the time has come to stop producing .gz duplicate copies of all our content as well, as XZ tools and libraries are now available on all major platforms. Starting September 1st, 2018, all tarball releases available via /pub download locations will only be available in XZ-compressed format. If you absolutely must have .gz compressed tarballs, you may obtain them from git.kernel.org by following snapshot download links in the appropriate repository view.