14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Steve Langasek presented the first edition of the Ubuntu Foundations Team weekly newsletter with some exciting information about the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
The first Alpha builds of Ubuntu 17.10 are almost here, due for release next week on June 29, 2017, for opt-in flavors, so the Ubuntu developers are working around the clock to add various new features, such as PIE (Position Independent Executables) support enabled by default for better security, as well as some other improvements in many areas of interest like Secure Boot.
"PIE is now enabled across all architectures by default in Artful. Targeted rebuilds have been done of packages which would break reverse-build-dependencies due to not being compiled with PIE," says Steve Langasek. "The rest of the archive will now pick up PIE support on i386, armhf, and arm64 over the development cycle with rebuilds."
PIE support is good news for Ubuntu Linux users as all PIE-enabled binaries will now be automatically loaded into random locations within the virtual memory, along with all of their dependencies, each time the respective applications are being executed. This makes Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks harder to execute properly.
Netplan to land in Ubuntu Cloud 17.10, Secure Boot improvements
Among other noteworthy enhancements that are coming to the Ubuntu 17.10 operating system later this year, we can mention the implementation of Netplan, Canonical's consolidated YAML network configuration across Ubuntu, in the Ubuntu Cloud images. Netplan is also being used by default to configure networks when installing an Ubuntu Server via the Debian Installer.
Other than that, there's good news for those who want to boot Ubuntu Linux alongside a Windows OS, as the Ubuntu developers are working on improving Secure Boot chainloading so you'll be able to properly boot Windows from the GRUB bootloader. Some patches were also added so that users will no longer be prompted to disable Secure Boot when using DKMS modules.
Lastly, it looks like Ubuntu 17.10 will be supporting the Python 3.6 series, which is now in the artful-proposed repository, and it looks like the transition to Python 3.6 for Artful Aardvark has begun. In related news, the Ubuntu Kernel team recently announced that they are targeting Linux 4.13 as the default kernel for Ubuntu 17.10, due for release on October 19, 2017.