Linux kernel 4.4 LTS is the target kernel for Ubuntu 16.04

Dec 16, 2015 02:50 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Joseph Salisbury has announced the availability of a new installation of the weekly Ubuntu Kernel Team Newsletter, which informs Ubuntu Linux users about the latest work done by the Ubuntu kernel developers.

Therefore, we can report today that the Ubuntu kernel devs have managed to update the Linux kernel packages of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system on the recently released Linux 4.3.3 kernel, which is now the latest stable and most advanced kernel branch available on the kernel.org website.

On the other hand, they are still tracking the Linux 4.4 kernel, which will be an LTS (Long-Term Supported) branch. The Linux kernel 4.4 packages are available in the unstable repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and they've just been updated to the Linux kernel 4.4 RC5 release announced by Linus Torvalds a few days ago.

"Our Xenial master-next branch has been rebased to v4.3.3 and uploaded to xenial-proposed. We continue to track v4.4-rc5 in our unstable repository. We will eventually rebase the Xenial master/master-next branches to v4.4 since that is our target kernel version for 16.04," is stated in the Ubuntu Kernel Team Weekly Newsletter published on December 15, 2015.

Canonical adopts Linux kernel 4.2 for Ubuntu 15.10

In other interesting kernel news, we reported earlier that Canonical's Ubuntu kernel developers announced that they would keep the Linux 4.2 kernel branch alive for the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system. Linux kernel 4.2 reached end of life on December 15, 2015, as renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed users earlier that day.

The Ubuntu kernel devs also notify us that they are now building Linux kernel packages for the s390x (IBM System z) hardware architecture for the Ubuntu Linux operating system. They’ve also laid down the release schedule for the current and next cycle for all supported kernel versions and Ubuntu OSes. The final release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) will be powered by Linux kernel 4.4 LTS.