14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical on Wednesday announced that the Ubuntu Kernel Team had started work on a Linux 4.12-based kernel for the Raspberry Pi 2 variant of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
We've already told you a few weeks ago that Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel Team plans to ship Ubuntu 17.10 with the Linux 4.13 kernel by default, and work on that front already started. They're currently following the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.13 and recently rebased their builds on the RC4 milestone announced by Linus Torvalds this past weekend.
The plan hasn't changed, Ubuntu 17.10 will be powered by Linux kernel 4.13, but it looks like the Ubuntu Kernel Team started work on a special kernel for Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers, for Ubuntu 17.10, that's based on the Linux 4.12 kernel series. And they've recently updated their Linux 4.12 kernels to the latest 4.12.5 release that was announced last week.
AUFS and VirtualBox Guest drivers added to Linux 4.13 for Ubuntu 17.10
Besides rebasing the Linux 4.13-based kernel for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) on the upstream Linux kernel 4.13 Release Candidate 4 (RC4) build, the Ubuntu Kernel Team also managed to add a VirtualBox Guest driver, as well as an AUFS driver. Users can try the Linux 4.13 RC4 kernel on their Ubuntu 17.10 installations from the staging repository or by downloading it directly from the mainline PPA.
In the meantime, Ubuntu 17.10 remains based on the Linux 4.11 kernel that's being used on the current stable release of the operating system, Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), and it looks like kernel 4.11.0-12.18 was recently uploaded to the proposed repository for testing purposes, and it should soon hit the stable repos on Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark).
In related news, the Ubuntu Kernel Team worked hard in the past week to release the Stress-ng 0.08.10 tool with improvements on the dirdeep stressor and a fix for an issue with the parsing of job scripts, as well as intel-cmt-cat 1.1.0 (Intel Platform Quality of Service and Cache Allocation Technology tools). The Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze stage is currently scheduled for October 5, and the final release will hit the streets in two months, on October 19, 2017.