A malicious USB device could be installed, potentially allowing for remote code execution. This issue did not affect Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The new kernel release 5.0 has been released. This will replace the previous 5.0+git20180609. It provides a number of bug fixes, security updates and new features. The following release notes can be viewed on the download page. On Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the new kernel will be 5.0. At the time of writing, the new kernel has not been released in the official repositories of some flavours of Ubuntu, including the community ones. The community How to install a new kernel on Ubuntu/Debian series instructions have been updated to include the steps for installing the new kernel.
In order to install the new kernel, upgrades from the previous 5.0 will be necessary. The 5.0 packages will remain in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for some time. As soon as the new kernel is released, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users will be upgraded to it via an automatic mechanism.

New kernel features

There are a number of new features in the new kernel, as well as several bug fixes. The following highlights some of them:
- On a 64-bit system, the top 8k memory limit has been increased to 64GB.
- CPU frequency scaling has been improved to increase underclocking and overclocking performance.
- New ARM64 support has been added which allows for more efficient use of CPU resources on low-power devices.
- XFS filesystem performance has been improved.

New features of the new kernel

The following features have been introduced with this new kernel:
- Hardware Spectre mitigations
- Jitter buffer tuning for latency reduction
- New power management framework, to reduce power consumption and system boot time
- New support for microcode updates using a microcode database

Timeline

Published on: 02/16/2022 20:15:00 UTC
Last modified on: 05/11/2022 14:07:00 UTC

References