Hi guys prob a silly question...
i only just read now that linux kernel v4 was released about 11 days ago...can any distros upgrade there kernel to 4 or only specific ones?

Is there really a huge benefit in doing so?

should i just lookup the information in the distros web site?

Yes, support for newer hardware is the biggest one.

It's just a version change. It would have been 3.20 after 3.19. But torvalds thought of changing major number.

Yes. With each version some newer hardwares get supported.

Fedora 22 has picked up this kernel version.

so is it only really the most up to date distros that can take advantage of 4?
could you upgrade centos7,debian wheezy and slackware 14.1 to kernel v4?

No one can upgrade/update the kernel for distros but only distro developers can do that. Except for may be distros that are built from source and used.

You can use the kernel on any distro. If your distro doesn't provide it you can either build it yourself or look out for third party packages.

thanks TobiSGD and all!!!

The elrepo repository has a 4.0 kernel that is built for CentOS 7 (also one for CentOS 6, which I am using). To use it, go to the elrepo.org site, import the public key, and install the elrepo-release RPM, as instructed on the home page. Then run(To avoid conflict with the standard kernel versions, the elrepo mainline kernel packages are named "kernel-ml".)

It is worthwhile reading the notes and warnings on http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-ml.

Hi,
I know that Slackware can be used with a new kernel compiled. Not that much trouble to get the source and configure locally.

will check out the new info...thanks

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this? I'm running kernel 4.0 on this laptop and kernel 3.19 on my desktop* -- both of which are running Debian Sid which only has kernel 3.16 installable if headers are required. I did so by building .deb packages using the source from kernel.com.

*Problems with NVIDIA dkms not working with kernel 4.0.

Debian has a kernel-package package along with standard build tools. This will let you roll your own kernel package and not have to wait for said distro to adopt a new kernel. Bear in mind that a lot of patches (security wise) are back ported and even though a distros kernel might have an OLD version number, it may not be as OLD as it might seem in the package manager.

The build process is fairly simple if you're familiar with it. Copy the /boot/config, then make oldconfig, and other kernel build procedures. Which haven't changed much in 20+ years. Aside from a lot of girth from a larger source tree. And the resulting size of the kernel. At worst, try it, but keep the OLD kernel to recover with if it doesn't work.