What is HWE?

Hardware Enablement Stacks (HWE) are incorporated into installers for select LTS point releases in order to provide hardware support introduced in newer Ubuntu releases. For Ubuntu 12.04 the point releases are .2/.3/.4/.5 and the corresponding Ubuntu releases are 12.10/13.04/13.10/14.04.

The HWE path can be obtained in 2 ways:

1. Installing Ubuntu from the media (ISO) for these point releases (where HWE is used by default)
2. Manually installing some packages

End-of-life (EOL) for 12.04, 12.04.1, and 12.04.5 HWE is April 2017 but for the other HWE stacks it is roughly when 14.04.1 is released: Aug 8, 2014. Since HWE (and thus a new kernel series) cannot be introduced through regular package updates it is possible to update a 12.04 (or 12.04.1) system to arrive at a later point release and still preserve the EOL date of April 2017.

Further reading:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack (HWE details)

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Support (Kernel team)

And why should I care?

Starting Aug 8, 2014 systems running 12.04.2 HWE, 12.04.3 HWE, or 12.04.4 HWE will no longer receive software updates for the kernel and, if you're running it, the graphics stack.

How do I know if I'm affected?

You can:

1. use a tool expressly designed to let you know
2. look at what packages you have installed

Tool

The tool is called hwe-support-status and it will be available first in the -proposed and then in the -updates repositories:

• precise-proposed (by June 13)
• precise-updates (by June 27)

COMES WITH WHAT PACKAGE?

hwe-support-status

Get it from Launchpad if you want it earlier:

sudo apt-get install bzr -y
cd ~
bzr co --lightweight  lp:~mvo/update-manager/hwe-support-status
cd hwe-support-status
./hwe-support-status

Packages

Check your running kernel version:

uname -r

• you are affected if it shows a kernel in these series: 3.5 or 3.8 or 3.11
• you are not affected if it shows a kernel in these series: 3.2 or 3.13

This method does not check for a graphics stack HWE. However, you cannot get a HWE graphics stack without a corresponding HWE kernel unless you've done things manually. Note that such a combination (HWE graphics with non-HWE kernel) is not supported.

What to do if I'm affected?

You have three options:

1. Install 12.04.5 HWE (Trusty kernel/graphics)

1. Install 12.04.5 HWE (Trusty kernel/graphics)

This depends if you are running on a desktop or server system. The hwe-support-status script will tell you exactly what you need to run.

• Desktop: sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-trusty xserver-xorg-lts-trusty libgl1-mesa-glx-lts-trusty
• Server: sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-trusty

Then reboot into your new Trusty hardware stack.

2. Upgrade from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS

The only command you need to run is: sudo do-release-upgrade (currently you would need to do '-d')

But it's strongly recommended to make sure the system is in a good state before upgrading. More details will be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/TrustyUpgrades which unfortunately doens't have 12.04->14.04 notes yet.

It generally boils down to make sure you have free space (2x the size of all installed packages - also consider running apt-get autoremove to clean up old packages), make sure you are fully up to date, make sure reboots works normally (and on dual boot Linux machines, note which one controls grub), and make a backup.

3. Fresh Install of 14.04 LTS

You always have the option of reploying the machines with a fresh copy of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the reconfiguring them to your needs.

What are the pros and cons of those options?