1204_HWE_EOL

Revision 3 as of 2014-05-09 15:13:10

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WARNING: THIS PAGE IS A WIP!

Contents

  1. What is HWE?
  2. How to determine if I am affected?
    1. automatically
    2. manually
  3. Important Dates
  4. What are my options if I am affected?
    1. What are the pros and cons of those choices?

What is HWE?

Hardware Enablement Stacks (HWE) are incorporated into installers for select LTS point releases and provide hardware support from recent 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 a special kernel via a metapackage (ex: linux-image-generic-lts-saucy).

How to determine if I am affected?

NEED:

automatically

a. instructions on how to run hwe-support-status

  1. depending on what stage of release it is at:
    1. Launchpad only (stable only by May 23? Hopefully sooner; see email thread)
    2. precise-proposed (by June 13)
    3. precise-updates (by June 27)

manually

Important Dates

The HWE kernels and graphics stacks are only supported until August 8th, with the exception being the lts-trusty backport from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

What are my options if I am affected?

  • Install the 12.04 + Trusty HWE backport which will be supported until 12.04 goes EOL. This does mean the kernel and graphics stack will be upgraded.
  • Upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04

What are the pros and cons of those choices?

HWE Upgrade Only

Full 14.04 Upgrade

Kernel

14.04 Kernel version (3.13 kernel)

14.04 Kernel version (3.13 kernel)

Xorg

14.04 Xorg and Graphics Stack

14.04 Xorg and Graphics Stack

EOL

12.04 EOL (April 2017)

14.04 EOL (April 2019)

Applications/Servers

Generally no change*

Newer 14.04 Versions will be installed

Upgrade Time (estimates with fast hardware)

10-30 Minutes with reboot

1-3 hours with reboot +

*It's important to note that changing the Linux kernel/Xorg stack can affect applications. For example the 14.04 kernel can online resize ext4 partitions much faster than the 12.04 kernel can. +Note: A fresh install of 14.04 is much faster than an upgrade and is definitely an option if you would prefer not upgrading in place.