ReleaseNotes

Revision 13 as of 2014-10-23 14:27:50

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Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 14.10 and its flavors.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 14.10 will be supported for 9 months for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin along with all other flavours.

Official flavour release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.


Get Ubuntu 14.10

Download Ubuntu 14.10

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs from:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.10/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/14.10/release/ (Ubuntu Cloud Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/14.10/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/releases/14.10/release/ (Ubuntu Core)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/14.10/release/ (Edubuntu DVD)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/14.10/release/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/14.10/release/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/14.10/release/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/14.10/release/ (Ubuntu GNOME)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/14.10/release/ (UbuntuKylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/14.10/release/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/14.10/release/ (Mythbuntu)

Upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

To upgrade on a desktop system:

  • 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 '14.10' is available.
  • Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade 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 14.10

Please see the Utopic 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 14.10.

For a list of all packages being accepted for Ubuntu 14.10, please subscribe to utopic-changes.

Linux kernel 3.16

The Ubuntu 14.10 release delivers a v3.16 based kernel. This brings a significant number of bug fixes and new hardware support including expanded architecture support for Power 8 and arm64 platforms. It also includes support for Intel Cherryview, Haswell, Broadwell and Merrifield systems, and initial support for Nvidia GK20A and GK110B GPU’s. There is improved graphics performance on many Nvidia, Intel and ATI Radeon devices and also audio improvements with support for the Radeon .264 video encoder. Expanded platform support is enabled via support for 64 bit EFI boot on 32 bit EFI BIOS. This release also brings performance improvements in suspend/resume times.

For developers we see significant improvements in tracing and debugging with new triggers for kernel trace points, and expansion of uprobe support. This release also brings a new experimental deadline CPU scheduler.

For servers we see better support for bursty workloads, improved resident set tracking, and a better NUMA migration strategy. Filesystem support is also improved with faster file allocations for database use and several filesystems show performance improvements including XFS and Btrfs. XFS now has stabilized its v5 format and sports expanded direct I/O support. Btrfs now supports per directory switchable compression modes. raid5 performance is also improved. This release also brings improvements to networking, including a new packet scheduler for high latency links, and efforts to bring IPv6 support in line with IPv4. We see performance improvements for openvswitch and VTI tunneling. As always, various new pieces of hardware are now supported including Intel AVX-512 and Intel MXP.

On cloud we see Hyper-V, XEN, and KVM networking performance improvements. Hyper-V now supports the hypervisor driven file copy and reference time services. For KVM we see improved support for passing through new x86 vector instructions.

On the security front we see full Kernel Address Space Layout Randomisation applied to the kernel and its modules, plus the closure of a number of information leaks in /proc. We also see additional support for cryptographic devices.

AppArmor

AppArmor added support for fine-grained mediation of unix(7) abstract and anonymous sockets and also added various policy updates and bug fixes. AppArmor policy has been adjusted for packages that ship it to work with these changes, but local policy may need to be adjusted unix rules. See man 5 apparmor.d for details.

Oxide

Oxide has been updated to use the latest Chromium Content API and includes numerous bug fixes and features to better support webbrowser-app, webapps and apps using UbuntuWebViews. 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 this release. 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.

Ubuntu Desktop

Unity

General

LibreOffice

Xorg

Ubuntu Server

OpenStack 2014.1

Ubuntu 14.10 includes the OpenStack 2014.2 (Juno) 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

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.

MORE HERE

Libvirt 1.2.8

Containers launched with libvirt-lxc can now be apparmor-protected.

Cgmanager support allows libvirt to be used in containers without cgroups mounted.

LXC 1.1

This includes container checkpoint and restart as a tech preview.

Ubuntu Touch


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 14.10. 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

  • Due to changes in syslinux, it is not currently possible to use usb-creator from 14.04 and earlier releases to write USB images for 14.10; we believe that it is also not possible to use usb-creator from a 14.10 system to write USB images for earlier releases. For now the workaround is to use a matching release of Ubuntu to write the images, but we intend to issue updates soon to work around this incompatibility. 1325801

Upgrade

Power Management

Desktop

Under certain circumstances (so far only reproducible in certain VM environments), lightdm will fail to start on boot. It can be manually started from a console with "sudo service lightdm start". This will be resolved shortly after beta-2 is out.

Migration

Graphics and Display

Networking

Kernel

  • When booting virtual machines installed with encrypted root and using "VGA" as the video adapter it may not be possible to enter the unlock password. Switching Video to QXL will allow booting of these instance. (See 1383851 for details.)

For a listing of more known issues, please refer to the Utopic Unicorn 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.

Participate in Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

More about Ubuntu

You can find out more about Ubuntu on the Ubuntu website and Ubuntu wiki.

To sign up for future Ubuntu development announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's development announcement list at: