14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu developers are getting closer to the official launch of Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and they have upgraded the Linux kernel once more.
The Ubuntu 14.10 development cycle has been rather uneventful and no major features have been implemented. The same cannot be said about the thousands of other packages that are used in the operating system, as most of them have been updated. This is also true for the Linux kernel.
Despite the fact that Ubuntu arrives like clockwork, every six months, its developers always try to add the latest kernel available whenever possible. Now that the development cycle is coming to an end, Canonical has finally settled on the kernel that will officially ship with the distribution.
Which is the lucky kernel version?
The Ubuntu developers and the Linux kernel team from Canonical usually wait until the last possible moment to add the most recent version possible, but there are some limits. Each new kernel release implemented needs to be tested and the bugs have to be fixed.
The problem is that Ubuntu has a fixed and predictable cycle, but the Linux kernel doesn't. The kernel devs usually push out a new version when it's ready and not anytime sooner. This means that it's difficult to predict which exact version of the kernel will be implemented in the official Ubuntu release.
"The Utopic kernel has been rebased to the v3.16.4 upstream stable kernel. This is available for testing as of the 3.16.0-21.28 upload to the archive. Please test and let us know your results. Also, Utopic Kernel Freeze is this Thurs Oct 9. Any patches submitted after kernel freeze are subject to our Ubuntu kernel SRU policy. I sent a friendly reminder about this to the Ubuntu kernel-team mailing list yesterday as well," says Canonical's Joseph Salisbury.
The Kernel freeze date for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) has passed and that means that the 3.16.4 version (the one used for the Ubuntu patched kernel) is the last update. Some of you might say that Linux kernel 3.17 was made available a few days before the Ubuntu freeze, but each new major update to this component creates many, many bugs. There was no time, in just a few days, to add 3.17 to Ubuntu 14.10.
This might actually be a good thing. If you take a look at the kernel list of available releases, you will only see even numbers. It's very likely that the 3.147 branch of the kernel will soon reach end of life and it’ll have a much shorter life than the nine months of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) is expected to arrive on October 23.