Kernel Team Summary – December 6, 2017

November 21 through December 04

Development (18.04)

Every 6 months the Ubuntu Kernel Team is tasked to pick the kernel to be used in the next release. This is a difficult thing to do because we don’t definitively know what will be going into the upstream kernel over the next 6 months nor the quality of that kernel. We look at the Ubuntu release schedule and how that will line up with the upstream kernel releases. We talk to hardware vendors about when they will be landing their changes upstream and what they would prefer as the Ubuntu kernel version. We talk to major cloud vendors and ask them what they would like. We speak to large consumers of Ubuntu to solicit their opinion. We look at what will be the next upstream stable kernel. We get input from members of the Canonical product strategy team. Taking all of that into account we are tentatively planning to converge on 4.15 for the Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS release.

On the road to 18.04 we have a 4.14 based kernel in the Bionic -proposed repository.

Stable (Released & Supported)

• The kernels for the current SRU cycle are being respun to include fixes for CVE-2017-16939 and CVE-2017-1000405.

• Kernel versions in -proposed:

    trusty                    3.13.0-137.186
    trusty/linux-lts-xenial   4.4.0-103.126~14.04.1
  
  
    xenial                    4.4.0-103.126
    xenial/linux-hwe          4.10.0-42.46~16.04.1
    xenial/linux-hwe-edge     4.13.0-19.22~16.04.1
  
  
    zesty                     4.10.0-42.46
  
  
    artful                    4.13.0-19.22
  

• Current cycle: 17-Nov through 09-Dec

             17-Nov   Last day for kernel commits for this cycle.
    20-Nov - 25-Nov   Kernel prep week.
    26-Nov - 08-Dec   Bug verification & Regression testing.
             11-Dec   Release to -updates.
  

• Next cycle: 08-Dec through 30-Dec(This cycle will only contain CVE fixes)

             08-Dec   Last day for kernel commits for this cycle.
    11-Dec - 16-Dec   Kernel prep week.
    17-Dec - 29-Dec   Bug verification & Regression testing.
             01-Jan   Release to -updates. 
  

Misc

• The current CVE status
• If you would like to reach the kernel team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-kernel
  channel on FreeNode. Alternatively, you can mail the Ubuntu Kernel Team mailing
  list at: kernel-team@lists.ubuntu.com.