Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS Delayed A Second Time

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was supposed to ship in mid-January and then up until today was expected to be released on Thursday. But now it's being delayed at least one more week.

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS had been delayed due to some parts of its hardware enablement (HWE) stack being changed, they decided in mid-January to push back the release to 2 February. Now today they've decided to delay it a second time due to an unrelated problem.

Leann Ogasawara requested the delay and it was granted. This delay is due to a just-identified "serious boot regression on ARM64." Fixing that issue will require changes to multiple components. The request was granted and now it's looking like 16.04.2 LTS will ship on 9 February, unless further issues push back the debut.

The Ubuntu 16.04.2 upgrade should be appreciated by those sticking to Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases since it back-ports the kernel, Mesa, and other components of what's used by the newer Ubuntu 16.10 release (albeit for AMDGPU-PRO users, this will cause issues until there is a new driver that plays nicely with the newer kernels).