14 DAY TRIAL // The Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) development cycle has started and the first daily builds are already out. The Ubuntu devs have also updated one of the most important components, the Linux kernel.
With Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) out the door and into the wild, the work for Ubuntu 15.04 has already started. In fact, the very next day after the October 23 launch, it was announced that Vivid Vervet was open for business. This is not something new for Canonical, but that doesn't make it any less interesting.
One of the most important components of any Linux distribution is the Linux kernel, and in Ubuntu at least, it goes through numerous updates until the devs decide on the final version. Because the Linux kernel development cycle is not predictable, it's difficult to anticipate what the version to actually make it into the Ubuntu distro will be, and that must be a problem for them.
The main issue is that Linux kernels with odd version numbers usually have very few point releases before they reach end of life. It happened more than once to have a supported Ubuntu version available for download and the Linux kernel that was used for it to be declared EOL. Canonical needs to pick up that branch and maintain it themselves for the duration of the support for the distro.
Only the latest kernel is usually added to Ubuntu
Users might have noticed that, sometimes, an Ubuntu release is made with a slightly older kernel than the latest one available. Ubuntu has a number of stages in its development and one of them is called kernel freeze. Beyond that point the kernel is no longer updated, but that doesn't mean that a newer one won't be made available in the meantime.
"The Vivid kernel has been opened and master-next rebased to the lastest v3.18-rc2 upstream kernel. We have withed uploading to the archive until we've progressed to a later -rc candidate," says Canonical's Joseph Salisbury in the summary from the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting.
As it stands right now it, Linux kernel 3.18 RC2 is the latest version put forth by Linus Torvalds. It's possible that Ubuntu 15.04 will be able to integrate Linux kernel 3.19 or even 3.20, but it depends only on the schedule of the kernel releases.
For now, if you want to try the Ubuntu 15.04 Daily Build, you can download it from Softpedia, but you won't see anything different from the previous edition, at least not yet.