Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Continues To Focus On The Linux 4.4 Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Continues To Focus On The Linux 4.4 Kernel

Ubuntu's kernel team continues to be focused on having Linux 4.4 for Ubuntu 16.04...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Linux-4.4-1

[FireBurn]

AMD are working on making the amdgpu module buildable out of tree so people with older kernels will be able to get the latest code using DKMS

[M@GOid]

The LTS releases get back-port graphic stack in 4 months after a normal release. 14.04LTS will get 15.10 hardware support in February, by my calculations. Is late but is not forever, for people who prefer stability.

[andreano]

Hope they fix nouveau for 4.4, it got totally crippled in 4.3.

[riklaunim]

Do we really need to freeze desktop kernel to provide "stability" and long term support? What are the costs of maintaining and creating backports, handling bug entries from more and more non-vanilla packages?

[nils_]

Do we really need to freeze desktop kernel to provide "stability" and long term support? What are the costs of maintaining and creating backports, handling bug entries from more and more non-vanilla packages?

I question the wisdom in that as well.

At least this time they are using a kernel that's officially maintained long term, instead of rolling their own. Ubuntu has been notorious for always landing between the LTS vanilla versions.

I also wonder what sort of great patches they put into the kernel that they even have to roll their own and why they don't try to get them accepted upstream.

[Passso]

Do we really need to freeze desktop kernel to provide "stability" and long term support? What are the costs of maintaining and creating backports, handling bug entries from more and more non-vanilla packages?

Just try to update a kernel version without anything else and all your "special" settings and modules (like closed source drivers, Vmware etc.) are screwed...

So basically Canonical would need to make available all modules compiled for all kernels (A*B factor) and need to maintain bugs for A* B different configurations.

Or they could also ask to dynamically rebuild/reload all the system delta by pack for something stable, like some rolling releases... generally so stable that most of them are marked beta/test

So yes at the moment 1 kernel number + backport is far far more simple and stable.

[trifud]

Wait, wait a second. Ubuntu 14.04, 14.04.02 and 14.04.03 all ship with different kernels. The vanilla 14.04 shipped with 3.13, 14.04.02 shipped with 3.16 and 14.04.03 shipped with 3.19. They are probably going to do the same in 16.04 - point releases could ship with newer kernels.