ReleaseNotes

Revision 91 as of 2014-04-17 10:55:13

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Introduction

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Ubuntu Kylin. All other flavours will be supported for 3 years.

Official flavour release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.


Get Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Download Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs from:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/14.04/release/ (Ubuntu Cloud Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/14.04/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/releases/14.04/release/ (Ubuntu Core)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/14.04/release/ (Edubuntu DVD)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/14.04/release/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/14.04/release/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/14.04/release/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/14.04/release/ (Ubuntu-GNOME)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/14.04/release/ (UbuntuKylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/14.04/release/ (Xubuntu)

Upgrading from Ubuntu 13.10

To upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 on a desktop system:

  • Open Software Sources.
  • Press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager" (without the quotes) into the command box.
  • Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '14.04 LTS' is available.
  • Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 on a server system:

  • Install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed.

  • Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade.

  • Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

Offline upgrade options via alternate CDs are no longer offered for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.


New features in 14.04 LTS

Please see the Trusty blueprint list for details.

Please test and report any bugs you find:

Updated Packages

As with every new release, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are being updated at a rapid pace. Many of these packages came from an automatic sync from Debian's unstable branch; others have been explicitly pulled in for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

For a list of all packages being accepted for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, please subscribe to trusty-changes.

Linux kernel 3.13

Ubuntu 14.04 includes the 3.13.0-24.46 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the v3.13.9 upstream stable Linux kernel. Along with the usual collection of new features, fixes and improvements, the following are some of the more noteworthy highlights since the previous LTS release:

  • Networking - Included Open vSwitch 2.0.1 support (including VXLAN), better bonding support, better bridge management and diagnosis and new buffer bloat avoidance measures. We also introduce better TCP connection management in the face of packet loss, plus TCP fastopen and improved attack tolerance. Intel wifi 6K/7K support was included as well as Infiniband stack updates to provide Mellanox RDMA and VXLAN support. Finally, we see the first stages of the switch to nftables, which should see incremental improvements to network security.
  • Scheduling - the default I/O scheduler was changed from CFQ to Deadline.
  • Thermal and Power Management - Power management and efficiency continues to be a focus and we saw the inclusion of the Intel RPL (Running AVerage Power Limit) support for enforcing and monitoring power limits on modern Intel processors. Additionally, we saw the introduction of the Intel PowerClamp driver for improved power efficiency. We also disabled intel_pstate by default as we witnessed poor behavior on some systems (1188647)

  • Virtualization - As well as major improvements to Xen and KVM (including ARM support for both), we also see VMware support, full support for KVM 2.0.0 (including QEMU KVM), version 1.2.2 of libvirt and the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. Alongside general performance improvements in the virtio subsystems, support for namespaces in containers was also introduced and we finally saw support for unprivileged containers.
  • Filesystems - general performance and latency improvements have been made across the board for filesystems such as Btrfs, XFS, and Ext4. Metadata checksumming and improved quota support for Btrfs, XFS, and Ext4 have been included as well as Ext2/3 support via the Ext4 driver.
  • Security - Improvements to AppArmor allow more fine-grained control over applications. See detailed AppArmor release notes below. The Integrity Measurement Architecture has also been enabled. Packaging updates for signed kernels were also performed as well as EFI boot support.

  • Hardware support - ARM multiplatform support has been added, enabling you to build a single ARM kernel image that can boot across multiple hardware platforms. Additionally, the ARM64 and Power architectures are now fully supported. X32 ABI support (64-bit mode with 32-bit pointers) was also introduced. We also saw copious amounts of HW enablement such as support for Intel Haswell processors, Lynx Point chipsets, Avoton SoC support, i915 driver support for Broadwell graphics, AMD Kabini and Kaveri APU enablement, AMD Sea Islands GPU enablement, and ARM64 APM X-Gene platform support. Also, Ubuntu kernel flavors and architectures were cleaned up with the removal of the i386 generic-pae flavor and eliminating armel architecture support.

Python 3.4

We eventually intend to ship only Python 3 with the Ubuntu desktop image, not Python 2. The Ubuntu 14.04 LTS image continues this process, although we will not be able to convert everything to Python 3 for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

AppArmor

AppArmor has a number of new features in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS LTS. Notably:

  • Support for fine-grained mediation of signal(7)
  • Support for fine-grained mediation of ptrace(2)
  • Improved DBus mediation
  • New abstractions for applications running under Unity
  • Several new tunables supporting XDG user directories, dovecot and more
  • Various policy updates in support of new features and bug fixes
  • A new @{profile_name} variable to reference the current profile name within policy

  • New Python and Python3 AppArmor libraries (python-apparmor and python3-apparmor)

AppArmor policy has been adjusted for packages that ship it to work with these changes, but local policy may need to be adjusted, especially for signal and ptrace rules. See man 5 apparmor.d for details.

Oxide

Oxide is a webview based on Chromium to deliver web content. Oxide allows us to better support 3rd party developers and applications within the Ubuntu archive by providing a fast, secure and up to date webengine library for the duration of the LTS. While other web content libraries such as those based on webkit are available, their maintenance will be limited to new upstream minor version releases only, and application developers are encouraged to use Oxide instead.

Upstart 1.12.1

Upstart has been upgraded to version 1.12.1. More details are available in the Upstart Technical Overview.

Unity Desktop Features

Unity Desktop has been streamlined for the 14.04 LTS release. Support for High-DPI screens, improved lock screen design and locally integrated menus have been integrated in this release.

Ubuntu Server

OpenStack 2014.1

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the OpenStack 2014.1 (Icehouse) release of the following projects in Ubuntu main:

  • OpenStack Compute - Nova

  • OpenStack Identity - Keystone

  • OpenStack Imaging - Glance

  • OpenStack Block Storage - Cinder

  • OpenStack Networking - Neutron

  • OpenStack Object Storage - Swift

  • OpenStack Telemetry - Ceilometer

  • OpenStack Orchestration - Heat

  • OpenStack Dashboard - Horizon

The OpenStack Charms for deploying OpenStack using Juju have been updated to support deployment of Icehouse - see the charm release notes for full details.

WARNING: Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment.

Users of OpenStack 2012.1 (Essex) on Ubuntu 12.04 should note that several components have changed/been superseded over the last two years:

  • Nova Volume has been replaced by Cinder.
  • Neutron has been introduced alongside Nova Network (deprecated but not removed yet).
  • The configuration file format has changed from a flags based format to a section based ini style format - configuration files should be reviewed and updated accordingly.

Existing OpenStack installations must be step upgraded through interim OpenStack releases (Folsom, Grizzly and Havana) using the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04. The Ubuntu Cloud Archive also provides the Icehouse release for 12.04; Users may prefer to upgrade to this release on 12.04 prior to upgrading the base Ubuntu operating system to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Please refer to the upstream release notes for full details of upgrading between OpenStack releases and the features introduced in each release.

Puppet 3

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Puppet 3. This is a major version upgrade from previous Ubuntu LTS releases and includes many changes which are not compatible with Puppet 2.7.x.

Please review the upstream release notes to determine which breaking changes apply to your installation.

Xen 4.4

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Xen 4.4. This is a significant upgrade from the previous release. Of particular note the xen hypervisor no longer supports 32bit only CPUs on the x86 architecture; 32bit Dom 0 running on the 64bit hypervisor is still supported. The hypervisor will automatically be upgraded to the 64bit version (the Dom 0 does not need to change). Ensure your host is 64bit capable _before_ upgrading.

Also the XM (xend) management stack has been deprecated since Xen 4.1 and will be removed in the next version of Xen (4.5). Therefore we urge all users to start using the new xl toolstack. For that reason the default toolstack setting (/etc/default/xen) is changed to xl.

The format of normal configuration files is mostly identical, only usage of Python inside the config file is no longer supported. Also managed domains, which were managed by xend and stored in a different (sxpr) format will need to be migrated. When upgrading to Xen-4.4 an automatic migration of xend managed domains into xen and libvirt config files is attempted. However, due to many dependencies, this is failing more often than not. So when upgrade has been done and the host is running the new Xen hypervisor, the migration into xen config files can be started by calling "sudo /usr/lib/xen-4.4/bin/xen-migrate-xend-managed-domains". The resulting config files are written into /etc/xen and should be reviewed before usage.

Likewise, when libvirt is used to manage machines, the xend managed domains can be migrated into libvirt xml definitions by calling "sudo libvirt-migrate-xend-managed-domains". The resulting definitions should also get reviewed before usage (either virt-manager, virsh or looking in /etc/libvirt/libxl).

Once the new VM configs are working, it is recommended to remove the old ones (/var/lib/xend/domains/). This is not done automatically for safety reasons.

Ceph 0.79

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Ceph 0.79; Ceph will be upgraded to the Firefly stable release via a stable release update when 0.80 is released upstream. This release of Ceph includes efficient erasure coding of data for cold storage and tiered pooling. Please refer to the upstream release notes for full details on upgrading.

Qemu 2.0.0

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Qemu 2.0.0. Due to incompatibilities in the emulated hardware, KVM virtual machines created on 12.04 cannot be live migrated to 14.04 LTS. Likewise, virtual machine snapshots from 12.04 cannot be restored on 14.04 LTS. Memory snapshots can be restored, and virtual machines created on 13.10 can be migrated to 14.04 LTS.

User emulation of arm64 binaries is now supported, and support for armhf and arm64 kvm-accelerated virtual machines is now available.

Open vSwitch 2.0.1

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Open vSwitch 2.0.1. See the upstream release notes for details of all features included in this release. Note that the openvswitch-datapath-dkms package is not compatible with the Linux 3.13 kernel shipped as default in 14.04 LTS; The native Open vSwitch module in the 3.13 kernel provides all the features of the dkms module apart from support for experimental LISP tunnelling and should be used instead.

Libvirt 1.2.2

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Libvirt 1.2.2 with full support for ceph and Xen 4.4

LXC 1.0

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the newly released LXC 1.0, featuring fully unprivileged containers, a new more flexible seccomp policy language, fast container clones using btrfs, overlayfs, LVM or zfs backing stores, API bindings for python 3.0, go, ruby, lua and C, and SELinux support.

MAAS 1.5

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS contains MAAS version 1.5. In addition to bug fixes and minor improvements, MAAS version 1.5 contains the following major features:

  • Advanced Networking: MAAS now supports multiple managed network interfaces in a single cluster, and has support for VLANs.

  • Zones: A Zone is arbitrary grouping of nodes. This grouping can then be used as a constraint for deployment.

  • Hardware Enablement Kernels: MAAS now supports using kernels other than the default kernel for an Ubuntu release. This includes enlistment, commissioning and deployment and is primarily focused on allowing users to use Kernel/LTSEnablementStack.

See the upstream changelog for full change information.

Juju 1.18.1

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the latest stable release of Juju, the service orchestration tool for Ubuntu. See the upstream release notes for full details of all new features and improvements in this release. Existing 1.16.6 juju environments can be upgraded to 1.18.1 by running:

juju upgrade-juju

strongSwan

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS now includes official support for strongSwan IPSec. strongSwan is a feature rich, modern IPSec solution. ipsec-tools, the supported IPSec solution in prior releases of Ubuntu, now receives community support and users are encouraged to migrate to strongSwan to maintain official support. For more information, please see this page.

MySQL

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS continues to provide official support for MySQL 5.5. Three other community supported alternatives of MySQL are also included:

  • MariaDB 5.5 - a drop in replacement for MySQL 5.5.
  • Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5 - a Galera based Active/Active MySQL solution.
  • MySQL 5.6 - the next release of Oracle's MySQL.

Note that upgrading to MySQL 5.6 is an automatic one way process; it is possible to downgrade manually - see the upstream documentation on details of how to perform this process.

Apache 2.4

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Apache 2.4; this is a major version upgrade from Apache 2.2 in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and users should take care to read the upgrade notes included in the packaging and the upstream upgrading documentation.

PHP 5.5

PHP has been updated to 5.5, which is a major upgrade from 5.3 as available in the previous LTS. Upstream introduced some incompabilities in this update, and recommend testing before upgrading production environments. For more details, see the PHP migration guide.

Due to licensing problems, Debian dropped the PHP-supplied json module in Debian bug 692613, replacing it with a compatible json module instead. Ubuntu is aligned with Debian by default, and thus has picked up this change in 14.04 LTS, first in 13.10. The upgrade process will automatically pull in the new module. There have been claims of some edge case incompabilities in bug 1287726; testing is advised.


Known issues

As is to be expected, at this stage of the release process, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 14.04. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Boot, installation and post-install

  • The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the "Try Ubuntu without installing" boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)

  • When using installer to upgrade or reinstall an existing installation with encrypted swap, the installer may fail to reuse the partition. A warning will be shown, however the installation can be completed. The installed system will not have swap activated and users are advised to recreate swap on their systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (1172002)

  • Installs on very small memory systems may fail to start or exit without completing with no error. It is recommended that swap be created before install for such systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (1172161)

  • In rare circumstances the 'Next' button on the installer 'Install Type' screen is non-functional. This is intermittent and may be resolved by hitting 'Back' and retrying. (1172572)

  • On some systems, after installation, pressing 'Enter' doesn't reboot the system and a hard reset is required (1297851)

  • Live session starts with keyboard set to English US and time zone as UTC even if non-english languages are selected (1297234)

Upgrade

  • During upgrades from 12.04 LTS in graphical mode (with update-manager -d) prompts are displayed in the terminal window of the upgrader. To proceed with the upgrade, read the question and if you agree, click in the terminal window of the upgrader, press the 'Tab' key until the focus in on '<Ok>' and validate with 'Enter' (1298281)

Power Management

  • On some systems, when opening lid, there is a kerneloops with a suspend/resume failure message seen. (1054732)

Migration

Graphics and Display

Networking

  • In order to improve compatibility with other local nameserver packages, NetworkManager now assigns IP address 127.0.1.1 to the local nameserver process that it controls instead of 127.0.0.1. If the system's /etc/resolv.conf is absent or is a static file instead of the symbolic link to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf installed by default then this static file will have to be updated by the administrator in order to continue using the NetworkManager-controlled nameserver.

AppArmor

  • The major tools in apparmor-utils AppArmor 2.8.95 have been rewritten to improve maintainability. While this allows us to better support them and add fixes going forward, currently the aa-genprof and aa-logprof CLI tools contain several bugs (1294797, 1296218) that affect their utility. These bugs should be fixed before release or in an SRU. It is recommended that people develop policy manually at this time.

Kernel

  • 1265885 - Poor Synaptics touchpad support. The workaround at the time of 14.04's release is to blacklist the i2c_hid driver. A newer hid-rmi driver is going upstream which should provide improved support (See 1305522). We are currently investigating the production quality of the driver and if it will be feasible to provide this in a 14.04 kernel update.

  • 1308761 - AppArmor spams log with warning message. Patches are currently being produced and we intend for this issue to be resolved with the first kernel SRU (stable release update) for Trusty.

  • 1292467 - Some laptops (particularly netbook class) with older graphics can experience poor graphical performance when starting with a high resolution external monitor attached. The reason for this is that some graphics cards (like the Intel 945GSE) cannot support accelerated 3D graphics when the combined width of both screens exceeds a certain threshold (typically 2048 pixels). See the bug for appropriate workarounds.

For a listing of more known issues, please refer to the Trusty Tahr bug tracker in Launchpad.


Official flavours

The release notes for the official flavours can be found at the following links:


More information

Reporting bugs

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.

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