Ubuntu Will Be Skipping Non-Critical Linux Kernel Updates For September

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Will Be Skipping Non-Critical Linux Kernel Updates For September

With the exception of critical security issues/bugs, Canonical will be skipping over shipping stable release updates for the Linux kernel in Ubuntu until early October...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Skipping-Kernel-SRU-Fix

[royce]

Judging by the late-hour announcement and at least a whole month of downtime of whatever system, sounds like a major problem.

[cynic]

are people actually paying money for Ubuntu "Pro" ?

[carguello2]

are people actually paying money for Ubuntu "Pro" ?

Corporations and small medium size businesses sure are. At $25 per month per Desktop, I don't think this is viable for end users or novice users (Besides, you already have the free plan that can cover up to 5 of your devices).

[royce]

are people actually paying money for Ubuntu "Pro" ?

Yes. I have seen it at a few of my clients. Usually, fleets of in-house mission-critical servers running Ubuntu 18.04 or even 16.04 which for various reasons can't be upgraded.

[sarmad]

are people actually paying money for Ubuntu "Pro" ?

Enterprise, for sure. The live kernel update feature alone is enough reason to pay the 25$ monthly cost. Rebooting live servers is something all companies want to minimize as much as possible.

[muncrief]

Judging by the late-hour announcement and at least a whole month of downtime of whatever system, sounds like a major problem.

Indeed royce. Delaying updates for an unspecified time, though they say they're targeting but not guaranteeing October, with such a vague explanation is pretty odd.

[CommunityMember]

Enterprise, for sure. The live kernel update feature alone is enough reason to pay the 25$ monthly cost. Rebooting live servers is something all companies want to minimize as much as possible.

Better designed apps/solutions/VMs(*) should either be properly scale-outable and/or be able to be live migrated to different underlying hardware and OS variants such that the need for live patching is reduced and eliminated.

(*) yes, lots of enterprises are not running well designed solutions, but they should have a plan to be getting there if minimal outages are also important to them.

[timrichardson]

What would they normally be backporting to a stable kernel anyway, apart from critical bug fixes? Isn't that the description of what a stable kernel is?

[CommunityMember]

What would they normally be backporting to a stable kernel anyway, apart from critical bug fixes? Isn't that the description of what a stable kernel is?

Canonical's stable kernels get important fixes on a regular basis (along with critical fixes). The determination of what important fixes that are actually applied by a distro is somewhat complicated, but is typically about fixes that solve issues directly reported by customers or have wide general applicability. By observation it would seem that the older the kernel is the less likely a distros customer will experience some new problem on that older platform, and you end up mostly with (critical) security related fixes.