14 DAY TRIAL // They promised, and they will deliver! Canonical recently announced that they started working on rebasing the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system on the Linux 4.13 kernel.
One of the highlights of Ubuntu Kernel Team's latest newsletter is the fact that work started on the building and testing Linux kernel 4.13 for Ubuntu 17.10, and it looks like users can already install the second Release Candidate (RC) milestone announced by Linus Torvalds last week.
Canonical plans to ship the final release of Ubuntu 17.10 with the Linux 4.13 kernel, but, for now, the current daily builds and the recently released Alpha 2 milestone for opt-in flavors are powered by the Linux 4.11 kernel packages of Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), yet the Linux 4.12 kernel is available in the staging repository.
"Work on 4.13 for Artful has been started," said the Ubuntu Kernel Team in their latest newsletter announcement. "We intend to target a 4.13 kernel for the Ubuntu 17.10 release. The artful kernel is now based on Linux 4.11. The Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze is Thurs Oct 5, 2017."
Of course, let's not forget the fact that the Ubuntu Kernel Team does a great job at keeping all supported Ubuntu Linux releases up-to-date every time a new upstream kernel is released, and they pushed a new major update last week for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) to fix six vulnerabilities.
The transition to GCC 7 as default starts early August
In the meantime, Canonical engineer Matthias Klose announced that it would start the transition to the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 7 as default for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) as soon as next week, and it also looks like the Perl 5.26 transition has already started in the artful-propose repository.
Moreover, Canonical's Ubuntu developers recently finished the OCaml 4.04 and Python 3.6 transition for Ubuntu 17.10, changed the behavior of "do-release-upgrade -d" command to only upgrade supported Ubuntu releases to the current development version, and addressed reliability issues in unattended-upgrades.
In related news, they released Netplan 0.25 for Ubuntu with support for handling MTUs through the NetworkManager backend, as well as IPv6 RA and test fixes, updated the OpenJDK 8 implementation to the latest 8u141 security patch, and are preparing to launch the Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS point release on August 3, 2017.