Table of Contents

Contents

  1. Introduction
      1. Support lifespan
      2. Official flavour release notes
  2. Get Ubuntu 19.10
    1. Download Ubuntu 19.10
    2. Upgrading from Ubuntu 19.04
      1. Upgrades on i386
  3. New features in 19.10
    1. Updated Packages
      1. Linux kernel 🐧
      2. Toolchain Upgrades 🛠️
    2. Security Improvements 🔒
    3. Ubuntu Desktop
      1. GNOME 3.34 Desktop
      2. Ubuntu 19.10 New Features
      3. ZFS on root
      4. NVIDIA-specific Improvements
      5. Updated Applications
      6. Updated Subsystems
    4. Ubuntu Server
      1. Images
      2. QEMU
      3. libvirt
      4. dpdk
      5. Open vSwitch
      6. MySQL 8.0
      7. PHP 7.3
      8. Raspberry Pi 🍓
      9. OpenStack Train
      10. cloud-init
      11. curtin
      12. s390x
    5. Cloud Images ☁
      1. KVM-optimized guest images
  4. Known Issues
    1. Desktop
      1. Enabling Wayland support with the NVIDIA proprietary driver
      2. Fractional scaling in Xorg sessions
      3. Live Session can take a long time to start
      4. ext4 instead of ZFS displayed in confirmation dialog
      5. Unable to shutdown or restart from the log in screen
      6. Wrong Bootloader Device with 2 or more drives
    2. Raspberry Pi
      1. Pimoroni Fan Shim pauses boot
  5. Official flavours
  6. More information
      1. Reporting bugs
      2. Participate in Ubuntu
      3. More about Ubuntu

Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 19.10 and its flavours.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 19.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 2020. 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 19.10

Download Ubuntu 19.10

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs and flashable images from:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.10/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server for AMD64)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Less Frequently Downloaded Ubuntu Images)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/server/eoan/current/ (Ubuntu Cloud Images)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/19.10/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu Budgie)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu Kylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu MATE)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Xubuntu)

Upgrading from Ubuntu 19.04

To upgrade on a desktop system:

To upgrade on a server system:

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

There are no offline upgrade options 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.

Upgrades on i386

Users of the i386 architecture will not be presented with an upgrade to Ubuntu 19.10. Support for i386 as a host architecture is dropped in 19.10.


New features in 19.10

Updated Packages

Linux kernel 🐧

Ubuntu 19.10 is based on the Linux release series 5.3. It adds a variety of new hardware support since the 5.0 kernel from 19.04, including support for AMD Navi GPUs, new ARM SoCs, ARM Komeda display, and Intel Speed Select on Xeon servers. Significant developer-facing features include pidfd support for avoiding races cause by pid reuse, a new mount api, and the io_uring interface for asynchronous I/O. To help improve boot speed the default kernel compression algorithm was changed to lz4 on most architectures, and the default initramfs compression algorithm was changed to lz4 on all architectures.

Toolchain Upgrades 🛠️

Ubuntu 19.10 comes with refreshed state-of-the-art toolchain including new upstream releases of glibc 2.30, ☕ OpenJDK 11, rustc 1.37, GCC 9.2, updated 🐍 Python 3.7.5, Python 3.8.0 (interpreter only), 💎 ruby 2.5.5, php 7.3.8, 🐪 perl 5.28.1, golang 1.12.10. There are new improvements on the cross-compilers front as well with POWER and AArch64 toolchain enabled to cross-compile for ARM, PPC64 LE, S390X and RISCV64 targets.

Security Improvements 🔒

Ubuntu 19.10 comes with additional default hardening options enabled in GCC, including support for both stack clash protection and control-flow integrity protection. All packages in main have been rebuilt to take advantage of this, with a few exceptions.

Ubuntu Desktop

GNOME 3.34 Desktop

19.10 includes GNOME 3.34 which includes a lot of bug fixes, some new features and a significant improvement in responsiveness and speed.

Ubuntu 19.10 New Features

ZFS on root

NVIDIA-specific Improvements

Updated Applications

Updated Subsystems

Ubuntu Server

Images

The ppc64el and arm64 live-server ISO images are now considered production ready and are the preferred media to install Ubuntu Server on bare metal on the two architectures.

QEMU

QEMU was updated to 4.0 release.

See the 4.0 change log for major changes since Ubuntu 19.04.

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.

Qemu now has virglrenderer enabled which allows to create a virtual 3D GPU inside qemu virtual machines. That is inferior to GPU passthrough, but can be handy if the platform used lacks the capability for classic PCI passthrough as well as more modern mediated devices.

libvirt

libvirt was updated to version 5.6. See the upstream change log for details since version 5.0 that was in Ubuntu 19.04.

Among many other changes worth to mention is the ability to enable QEMUs ability to use parallel connections for migration which can help to speed up migrations if one doesn't saturate your network yet.

dpdk

Ubuntu includes the latest release 18.11.2 of the 18.11.x latest stable series of DPDK. The very latest (non-stable) version being 19.08 was not chosen for downstream projects of DPDK (like Open vSwitch) not being compatible yet.

See the 18.11.1 and 18.11.2 release notes for details.

Open vSwitch

Open vSwitch has been updated to 2.12.

Please read the release notes for more detail.

MySQL 8.0

MySQL has been updated to 8.0. See What Is New in MySQL 8.0 for upstream documentation on the changes introduced in MySQL 8, including features that have been deprecated or removed. The packaging also introduces MySQL Router in the mysql-router package in universe for additional HA and scalability capabilities, with a view towards introducing it into main in the next Ubuntu release.

PHP 7.3

PHP 7.3 brings some refinements to the language: Flexible heredoc and newdoc syntaxes, JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR, list() reference assignment, and several new functions. Case-insensitive constants and several functions have been deprecated and/or removed, so developers moving to 7.3 may find it help to review the 7.2 to 7.3 migration guide.

Raspberry Pi 🍓

Our Ubuntu 19.10 Raspberry Pi 32-bit and 64-bit preinstalled images (raspi3) now support the Raspberry Pi 4 platform out-of-the-box. With this, our images now support almost all modern flavors of the Raspberry Pi family of devices (Pi 2B, Pi 3B, Pi 3A+, Pi 3B+, CM3, CM3+, Pi 4B).

OpenStack Train

Ubuntu 19.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, Train, including the following components:

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.

Make sure you read the OpenStack Charm Release Notes for more information about how to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack using Juju.

cloud-init

The version was updated from 18.5 to 19.2. Notable new features include:

NOTE: Cloud-init frequently publishes updates to the eoan-updates apt repository pocket with updated versions of cloud-init per the cloud-init stable release update process (SRU). Machines with unattended upgrades configured will automatically get those cloud-init updates.

curtin

The version was updated from 19.2. Notable new features include:

s390x

IBM Z and LinuxONE / s390x-specific enhancements (since 19.04) include (partly not limited to s390x):

Cloud Images ☁

KVM-optimized guest images

A new amd64 qcow2 image has been added. The daily eoan builds are named eoan-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk-kvm.img and contain the linux-kvm kernel.

This image aims to provide an experience specific for the KVM hypervisor. This image does not have initramfs, and it offers multiple performance enhancements targeted at virtualized environments. Users should expect a shorter boot time when using the new KVM hypervisor image compared to traditional images.

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 19.10. 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

Enabling Wayland support with the NVIDIA proprietary driver

This is not something we recommend due to a number of bugs. But if you want to try it out then a new step is required in 19.10:

  1. Add kernel parameter nvidia-drm.modeset=1

  2. Comment out the nvidia line in /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules

  3. As step 2 may have reintroduced an old bug you might need to disable the integrated graphics/GPU in your BIOS.

Fractional scaling in Xorg sessions

If you enable fractional scaling in Xorg sessions then you may encounter reduced performance and screen tearing. There are two possible workarounds:

Live Session can take a long time to start

On older hardware with a slow install medium (e.g. older USB drive) the live session can take a few minutes to start while seeding the default snaps finishes.

ext4 instead of ZFS displayed in confirmation dialog

When the user continues after having selected to install the system with ZFS, the "Write to change disks" message prints that an ext4 partition will be created. This is technically correct but confusing to the user. (1847719)

Unable to shutdown or restart from the log in screen

The restart and shutdown options no longer work in the log in screen. This is being tracked in (1847896).

Wrong Bootloader Device with 2 or more drives

When installing a system with more than one drive, drive selection and bootloader selection may end up out of sync when choosing a non-first drive. LP #1847898

To ensure the correct boot loader device perform the following steps:

This will ensure that the desired device is used both for the boot loader and root filesystem.

Raspberry Pi

Pimoroni Fan Shim pauses boot

The Pimoroni Fan Shim for the Raspberry Pi 4 re-uses the serial console pins, pins 8 and 10 (GPIO14 and GPIO15 respectively), on the GPIO header to control its RGB LED. This results in "noise" on the serial line which stops u-boot during startup (as it thinks a key has been pressed). Adding the following line to /boot/firmware/syscfg.txt disables the serial console permitting the boot sequence to complete: 

enable_uart=0


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:

EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes (last edited 2019-12-12 14:58:49 by waveform)