For those Ubuntu users out there, the newest dot release, Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS is now available. The Ubuntu install base is very large. Whenever there is a new release, even a minor dot release, new installation media and images are built. The new releases often add incremental patches and updates so we follow them closely. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is the current long term support version so it is extremely popular and important to track.
You can check out the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS release notes here. We recommend browsing those notes for updates and bug fixes. Users with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS releases will get an upgrade option to 16.04 using 16.04.2. You can download the new Ubuntu version here.
On the OpenStack Mitaka side, that OpenStack revision was released in April 2016 and will be EOL’d in April 2017, or in the next two months. If you were thinking of using Ubuntu for OpenStack, you can see the OpenStack release cadence here.
Testing Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS with the latest Intel Atom C3000 “Denverton” Platforms
We did have the opportunity to test 16.04.2 LTS against the new Intel Atom C3000 platform. We ran into the same issue that we saw with 16.04.1 and 14.04.5 releases where the Intel X553 NICs were not recognized by the default installer since the ixgbe driver is too old.
Since we expect that Intel Atom C3000 platforms are going to start trickling in over the next few months, we are going to have a guide to getting the Intel ixgbe driver installed for the Denverton series.
Final Words
We have already updated our in-lab automated provisioning tool to use Ubuntu 16.04.2 instead of the 16.04.1 release we had been using. Thus far we have not seen any issues. We will be testing all of our benchmark and Docker images against the new Xenial release over the coming two weeks.
