Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS Released With Hardware Enablement Stack From Ubuntu 21.10

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS Released With Hardware Enablement Stack From Ubuntu 21.10

Canonical this afternoon published Ubuntu 20.04.4 as the newest point release to their current Long Term Support (LTS) series...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-20.04.4-LTS

[Danny3]

The last Ubuntu LTS without the Snap garbage!

[Developer12]

This is nice an all, but could they please fix the null pointer dereferences from acpi-call?

They updated Jammy Jellyfish (22.04) to acpi-call 1.2.2-1 but left it untouched for every other version of ubuntu. Lots of versions, all the way back to at least 20.04, have also moved from kernel 5.11 to 5.13 via HWE releases and are now experiencing kernel null pointer dereferences.

What this means is that for anyone running 20.04+ (but not still-experimental 22.04) on a thinkpad, if you use tlp to manage your battery you're going to get constant kernel breakage. For some people the constant kernel dumps filled up their BIOS's EFI NVRAM and bricked the laptop entirely. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...l/+bug/1953261

[TNZfr]

Regarding kernel versionning for 20.04LTS, all linux-oem* packages have been updated to version 5.14

[anarki2]

The last Ubuntu LTS without the Snap garbage!

I'm not sure what you mean, but Snap *is* most definitely present on 20.04.

[drake23]

I find the acpi/tlp bug quite dramatic. Can someone explain why the kernel has no safeguard for this? Is this again a lousy uefi implementation from the vendor?

[Smurphy]

I'm not sure what you mean, but Snap *is* most definitely present on 20.04.

But you can remove it. This is usually the first operation I do on a newly setup Ubuntu system nowadays. Purge snap.

[kylew77]

This is nice an all, but could they please fix the null pointer dereferences from acpi-call?

They updated Jammy Jellyfish (22.04) to acpi-call 1.2.2-1 but left it untouched for every other version of ubuntu. Lots of versions, all the way back to at least 20.04, have also moved from kernel 5.11 to 5.13 via HWE releases and are now experiencing kernel null pointer dereferences.

What this means is that for anyone running 20.04+ (but not still-experimental 22.04) on a thinkpad, if you use tlp to manage your battery you're going to get constant kernel breakage. For some people the constant kernel dumps filled up their BIOS's EFI NVRAM and bricked the laptop entirely. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...l/+bug/1953261

Bricking the entire laptop shouldn't be possible in any OS. This seems like a HUGE oversight. Especially since ThinkPads ship with Ubuntu options. I would be pissed if I had a bricked 2k+ laptop!

[Emmanuel Deloget]

But you can remove it. This is usually the first operation I do on a newly setup Ubuntu system nowadays. Purge snap.

Well, some important packages for servers are now snaps (20.04 LTS is for example the first LTS where lxd is a snap). We have been forced to re-recreate an internal version of of the lxd package -- granted, it's easier for us as we don't have to create the source packages, meaning that we don't have to package all the dependencies (which would have forced us to create an insane number of deb-src).

[Smurphy]

Well, some important packages for servers are now snaps (20.04 LTS is for example the first LTS where lxd is a snap). We have been forced to re-recreate an internal version of of the lxd package -- granted, it's easier for us as we don't have to create the source packages, meaning that we don't have to package all the dependencies (which would have forced us to create an insane number of deb-src).

Just using the server plain stuff. Adding docker & K8S from docker/k8s - and that's about the software I use from Ubuntu on a server now.
Desktop - well, depends. I tend to prefer using deb packages. I may have to go back to debian or so to avoid that crap.