14 DAY TRIAL // As of today, the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system is powered by the latest Linux 4.13 kernel, which arrived in the stable repositories along with GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 7.2.
So there you have it, Canonical kept on its promise to rebase the Ubuntu 17.10 release on the Linux 4.13 kernel series, and with today's repo sync, the previous Linux 4.12 kernel, which is now EOL (End-of-Life) upstream, were replaced by a 4.13.0-11 kernel that's apparently based on Linux kernel 4.13.1. Ubuntu 17.10 is also using the latest GCC 7.2 compiler and Mesa 17.2.1 graphics stack by default.
Linux kernel 4.13 launched earlier this month and comes with numerous new features and improvements, among which we can mention support for Intel's Cannon Lake and Coffee Lake CPUs, support for "lifetime hints" in the block layers and the virtual filesystem, AppArmor enhancements, and better power management.
It also adds support for non-blocking buffered I/O operations to improve asynchronous I/O support, AMD Raven Ridge support via the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver, support for five-level page tables for the s390 architecture, various enhancements to the EXT4 file system, better performance for HTTPS and other protocols, as well as support for the SMB 3.0 protocol for CIFS mounts.
Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze set for October 5, 2017
According to the release schedule of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), the Kernel Freeze stage is currently set for October 5, 2017, which means that after this date there won't be any modifications to the kernel packages until the official release of the distribution on October 19. But there's no need for any changes, expect rebasing the package on the latest Linux 4.13 kernel point release.
Unfortunately, Linux kernel 4.13 isn't a long-term support version, so we expect it to reach end of life in the next few months. Luckily, Ubuntu 17.10 isn't an LTS (Long Term Support) release as well, and will only be supported with security and software updates for 9 months, until July 2018. Next week, we'll be able the download the Final Beta and see what Canonical has in store for Ubuntu 17.10.
