14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Joseph Salisbury has announced the availability of this week's Ubuntu Kernel Team Newsletter, published on Tuesday, December 8, 2015, on the Ubuntu Wiki.
In last week's newsletter, the Ubuntu Kernel developers announced that they managed to rebase the master-next branch of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system on Linux kernel 4.3, which is the latest stable and most advanced Linux kernel version available at the moment of writing this article. They also continued the tracking of the Linux 4.4 kernel, which will be the target kernel for Xenial.
Today, the Ubuntu Kernel devs have been proud to announce that they've finally replaced Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf)'s Linux 4.2 kernel packages with the brand new Linux kernel 4.3. Therefore, the kernel packages of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS are now at version linux-4.3.0-2.11, available for testing in the default software repositories of the GNU/Linux distribution.
"Our Xenial master and master-next branch have both been rebased to v4.3. A v4.3 based kernel is now officially available for testing from the archive, linux-4.3.0-2.11. Please test and let us know your results. Our unstable repo has been rebased to track v4.4-rc4 in parallel. We will eventually transition both our Xenial master/master-next branches to v4.4 since that is our target kernel version for 16.04," say the Ubuntu devs.
Linux kernel 4.4 RC4 is now in the unstable repository
In parallel, the Ubuntu Kernel developers are continuing tracking the development of the forthcoming Linux 4.4 kernel. They've rebased the unstable repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on the recently released Linux kernel 4.4 RC4, which should be available in the master and master-next branches in the near features, as Linux kernel 4.4 is the target kernel for Xenial Xerus.
Next week, we will have more Ubuntu Kernel news for you. On the last day of 2015, you'll be able to test the first Alpha build of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), but only for opt-in flavors, such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu MATE. The final release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be unveiled on April 21, 2016, and it will be powered by Linux kernel 4.4 LTS.