The final release might ship with a different kernel

May 8, 2016 07:30 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu Kernel Team have published a new installment of their newsletter to inform the Ubuntu community about the latest work done on the kernel packages of the widely-used OS.

At the end of April, the Ubuntu developers have announced that the development of the next major release of the Debian-based operating system, Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), is officially open, which means that they will start uploading new package versions, sync the repositories with upstream, fix potential issues, and rebased the kernel packages, as everything right now in Yakkety is based on Xenial.

The Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) daily build live ISO images have been made available for download immediately after the April 21st release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), for early adopters, but most, if not all, of the packages, have the same versions as those in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, including the kernel. But it looks like that will change soon, and Ubuntu 16.10 will be powered by Linux kernel 4.6.

"We have opened our yakkety kernel repo at the following location: https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-kernel/ubuntu/+source/linux/+git/yakkety. At this time is it just a copy of our Xenial kernel. We'll look to get this rebased to v4.6-rc6 (or newer) soon. We are still evaluating which kernel version to converge on for the 16.10 release," explained the Ubuntu Kernel Team in their latest newsletter.

Final Ubuntu 16.10 release might ship with Linux kernel 4.7 or 4.8

However, the final release of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system, which will be officially unveiled later this year, on September 20, 2016, might ship with a different kernel version, as there should be at least two more Linux kernel branches released upstream, Linux kernel 4.7 and Linux kernel 4.8, one of which might get an LTS (Long Term Support) status.

Again, it is too early to make predictions on what Linux kernel version Ubuntu 16.10 will be based on, so for now, if you just want to track the development progress of Yakkety Yak, go and download the latest daily build ISO for your computer's hardware architecture (64-bit or 32-bit). Shortly, the distro will receive the latest RC build of Linux kernel 4.6, which should hit stable next week.