ReleaseNotes

Revision 30 as of 2018-10-18 11:35:34

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Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 18.10 and its flavours.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 18.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 2019. If you need Long Term Support, it is recommended you use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead.

Official flavour release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.


Get Ubuntu 18.10

Download Ubuntu 18.10

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs and flashable images from:

https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/ (Ubuntu MATE)

As fixes will be included in new images between now and release, any daily cloud image from today or later (i.e. a serial of 2018nnnn or higher) should be considered a beta image. Bugs found should be filed against the appropriate packages or, failing that, the cloud-images project in Launchpad.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04

Upgrades on i386

Users of the i386 architecture will not be allowed to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.10 as dropping support for that architecture is being evaluated and users of it should not be stranded on a release with a shorter support window than the release they are already running.


New features in 18.10

Updated Packages

OpenSSL 1.1.1 🔒

OpenSSL, the secure communication library using TLS protocol, is upgraded to 1.1.1 long-term support series. It supports for the recently approved TLSv1.3 standard. Multiple client and server applications have been enabled to use TLSv1.3 by default in Ubuntu 18.10 with many more to come in the next release. The older 1.0.2 series OpenSSL is still available, however, it is expected to be removed from the next Ubuntu release.

The Ubuntu project is currently evaluating replacing OpenSSL 1.1.0 with backported OpenSSL 1.1.1 in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Bug 1797386 🤞

Linux kernel 🐧

Ubuntu 18.10 is based on the Linux release series 4.18. It includes support for AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics processor, complete support for the Raspberry Pi 3B and the 3B+, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, many USB 3.2 and Type-C improvements, Intel Cannonlake graphics, significant power-savings improvements, P-State driver support for Skylake X servers, POWER memory protection keys support, KVM support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization, enablement of Shared Memory Communications remote and direct (SMC-R/D), Open for Business (OFB), and zcrypt on IBM Z among with many other improvements since the v4.15 kernel shipped in 18.04 LTS.

Toolchain Upgrades 🛠️

Ubuntu 18.10 comes with refreshed state of the art toolchain including new upstream releases of glibc 2.28, ☕ OpenJDK 11, boost 1.67, rustc 1.28, and updated GCC 8.2, 🐍 python 3.6.7 as default, python 3.7.1 as supported, 💎 ruby 2.5.1, php 7.2.10, 🐪 perl 5.26.2, golang 1.10.4. There are new improvements on the cross-compilers front as well with POWER toolchain enabled to cross-compile for ARM targets.

Ubuntu Desktop

Desktop Updates

18.10 ships with the latest GNOME desktop 3.30. This brings performance improvements and new features.

  • GNOME Disks now supports VeraCrypt

  • Settings includes a panel to manage Thunderbolt devices and shows those panels only where the relevant hardware is detected.
  • More shell components are cached in GPU RAM to reduce load and increase FPS count
  • Desktop zoom is now a lot smoother
  • Smoothing of window previews is now dependant on CPU/GPU availability so that busy applications don't impact the whole system when window previews are visible
  • Added the option to automatically submit error reports to the error reporting dialog window
  • Fingerprint libraries promoted to main to allow unlocking with fingerprints
  • Added snap support to XDG Portals and landed support in Ubuntu
  • The latest version of GS Connect is now packaged in the archive and easily installed

The latest releases of Firefox (63.0) and LibreOffice (6.1.2) are available and installed by default.

YARU Theme Updates

Yaru theme, the bold, the frivolous, yet distinctly Ubuntu saw further improvements and touchups. Integrates beautifully with GNOME v3.20 Desktop and improves usability with its careful use of semantic colors.

Ubuntu Server

qemu

QEMU was updated to 2.12 release.

See the change log for major changes since Bionic.

Migrations from former versions are supported just as usual. When upgrading it is always recommended to upgrade the machine types allowing guests to fully benefit from all the improvements and fixes of the most recent version.

libvirt

libvirt was updated to version 4.6. See the upstream change log for details since version 4.0 that was in Bionic.

Among many other changes administrators might like the ease of a new local include apparmor to the libvirt-qemu profile that allows local overrides for special devices or paths matching your setup without conffile delta that has to be managed on later upgrades.

dpdk

Ubuntu includes 17.11.x the latest stable release branch of DPDK. The very latest (non-stable) version being 18.08 was not chosen for downstream projects of DPDK (like Openvswitch) not being compatible.

See the release notes for details.

Open vSwitch

Open vSwitch has been updated to 2.10.

Please read the release notes for more detail.

cloud-init

The version was updated to 18.4. Notable new features include:

  • Add datasource Oracle Compute Infrastructure (OCI).
  • SmartOS: Support for re-reading metadata and re-applying on each boot (Mike Gerdts)

  • Scaleway: Add network configuration to the DataSource (Louis Bouchard)

  • Azure: allow azure to generate network configuration from IMDS per boot.
  • Support access to platform meta-data in cloud-config and user-data via jinja rendering.

  • OpenStack now runs at local time frame paving the way for network

    • configuration in the next release.

  • Fix utf-8 content in user-data LP: #1768600

  • many SmartOS improvements

curtin

The version was updated to 18.1.59. Notable new features include:

  • Enable custom storage configuration and multi-distribution support
  • Handle zpool/zfs clear when wiping disks
  • Rescan for lvm devices after assembling raid arrays
  • Add timing and logging functions
  • Parse_dpkg_version: support non-numeric in version string
  • Don't allow reads of /proc and modprobe zfs through
  • block: use uuid4 (random) when auto-generating UUIDS for filesystems
  • reread ptable after wiping disks with partitions

  • Fix WorkingDir class to support already existing target directory. (LP: #1775622)

  • Fix extraction of local filesystem image. (LP: #1775630)
  • Fix tip-pyflakes imported but unused call to util.get_platform_arch
  • subp: update return value of subp with combine_capture=True.
  • Continuous Integration test improvements

Known issues

As is to be expected, with any release, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 18.10. 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:

Desktop

  • When disconnecting from VPNs, DNS resolution may become broken requiring a restart of resolved. $ sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service Bug 1797415

  • The gnome-initial-setup Quit option from the application menu in the top bar doesn't quit the application. If you want to quit g-i-s use quit from the dock menu instead.


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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