The big server news of the day is the availability of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS codenamed Bionic Beaver. In the industry, this is major news because Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) releases happen only once every two years. The last one was Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in April 2016 which brought features like significantly improved ARMv8 support and ZFS to Ubuntu. With each LTS version, many software ecosystems will adopt the LTS version to ensure they have a stable running platform for years. For example, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) will support Ubuntu 18.04 LTS until 2023.
New in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver
Here are the highlights from the Ubuntu team on the new release:
- Linux 4.15 kernel with Spectre and Meltdown patches and AMD Secure Memory Encryption support
- Configure networking through netplan.io. ifupdown has been depreciated
- Updated MD driver for software RAID improvements and new ZFS on Linux support
- Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 2 will be moving from main in 20.04 LTS.
- Supported by Canonical until 2023
- Runs on all major architectures – x86, x86-64, ARM v7, ARM64, POWER8 and IBM s390x (LinuxONE)
- New ubuntu-minimal images that are smaller and boot faster
- A new, default server installer ISO with a new interface and faster install
- LXD 3.0 – Linux containers including clustering, Qos, and resource controls (CPU, memory, block I/O/ graphics, and storage quota)
- Updates to LXD (v3.0), DPDK (v17.11.1), Postgresql (v10.3), Libvirt (v4.0), Open vSwitch (v2.9), NGINX (v1.13), Qemu (v2.11.1), Docker (v17.03), Puppet (v4.10), MySQL (v5.7), PHP (v7.2), and more
- OpenStack updated to OpenStack Queens release.
Here are a ton of other changes. You can check them out here.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Support Cycle
Here is the chart showing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support along with the other active Ubuntu releases:
As you can see, 18.04 LTS will be supported for another five years.
Where to download Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
If you want to download Ubuntu 18.04 LTS head over to the Ubuntu website here.
