Common Infrastructure

Secure Boot

Ubuntu 12.10 is the first Ubuntu release to support UEFI Secure Boot, a standard for controlling what software can be run on a computer in an effort to curtail malware that takes over the system at boot time. Supporting Secure Boot, a part of the Windows 8 certification requirements for client systems, ensures that Ubuntu will continue to provide an “it just works” experience on new hardware.

Due to time pressures, only some flavors released with 12.10 will install and boot on Secure Boot hardware:

• Ubuntu desktop
• Ubuntu server
• Edubuntu

We expect to enable all other flavors in 13.04.

Migration-support deprecated

The tool responsible for migrating user accounts from other operating systems to Ubuntu (migration-assistant) has been removed from the installer.

Linux kernel 3.5.5

The Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal release includes the 3.5.0-17.28 Ubuntu Linux kernel which was based on the v3.5.5 upstream Linux kernel. This is an update from the 3.2.0-23.36 Ubuntu Linux kernel which shipped in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin and was based on the v3.2 upstream Linux kernel. Other notable changes with the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal kernel include:

• Transitioning of the i386 generic-pae flavor to become the generic flavor offering
• Collapsing of the virtual flavor back into the generic flavor
• Homogenizing the entire linux-meta package
• Arrival of a new highbank arm server kernel flavor
• Changing of the default scheduler from cfq to deadline
• Packaging updates for signed kernels

Python 3.2

The Ubuntu desktop has begun migrating from Python 2 to Python 3. Most Python applications included in the desktop and their dependent libraries have been ported to Python 3. In most cases, Python 3 versions of libraries are available alongside their Python 2 counterparts. Ported applications will only run with Python 3. Work will continue in Ubuntu 13.04.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

GNU Toolchain

Ubuntu 12.10 is distributed with an updated default toolchain that includes: GCC 4.7.2 (was GCC 4.6 in 12.04 LTS), a binutils snapshot from the 2.23 branch (was 2.22 in 12.04 LTS), eglibc 2.15, and gdb 7.5.

Further information can be found upstream (GCC-4.7, gdb).

Java Toolchain

Ubuntu 12.10 ships OpenJDK7 as the default Java implementation. This brings improved performance, new features and better compatibility with other Java 7 implementations.

Use of the OpenJDK6 is now deprecated and the openjdk-6-* packages in universe for Ubuntu 12.10 will not be provided in future releases of Ubuntu.

Installation

• We have received reports that booting the Ubuntu installer in UEFI mode from a USB disk on certain Samsung laptops (530U3C, NP700Z5C) may trigger a firmware bug that renders the machine unbootable. While this bug has not been confirmed to affect Ubuntu 12.10, users are advised to use caution when installing on Samsung laptops and ensure that they are configured for legacy BIOS mode, not UEFI mode. (1040557)
• The consolidation of desktop installation media into a single image means that some installation options that were previously available on the alternate CD have no direct replacement on the desktop image.
  • Users who were installing using the alternate CD to install with LVM or full-disk encryption can now use the desktop image for this.
  • To install LTSP, please install using the Ubuntu Server 12.10 image, then add ltsp after installation. You can also continue to install with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS media and upgrade to 12.10 from there.
  • There are several options for installing using software RAID. You can:
    • install using the mini.iso, distributed from the ‘debian-installer’ directory on the mirrors;
    • install using the desktop CD and migrate the disks to RAID post-install;
    • install with the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS alternate CD and upgrade.
• The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the “Try Ubuntu without installing” boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)
• ARM OMAP4 machines will sometimes boot to a black screen during installation. It’s likely that the system has booted fine, but you will need to switch to another tty then back to tty7 (Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then Alt+F7) to get graphics. (1065902)
• On ARM Panda boards with no external storage attached, the installer interface will be confusing and installation is likely to fail. We strongly recommend attaching an external hard disk when installing on Panda boards. (1053030)
• On a mac with an external display can not run in framebuffer mode error occurs on the 2nd reboot onwards. (1066883)

Kernel

• Haswell processor graphics is not fully supported. (1066975)
• On some systems, when opening lid, there is a kerneloops with a suspend/resume failure message seen. (1054732)
• On certain ASUS machines with AMD graphic chips, a WMI event and ACPI interrupt are sent at the same time when hitting the hotkey to change display mode, resulting in the display mode being changed twice in succession. Users can work around this using the Displays panel in System Settings for changing display modes. (1052278)
• On ASUS N53SN laptops, the kernel does not boot without noefi on commandline. (1053897)

Networking

• In order to improve compatibility with other local nameserver packages, NetworkManager now assigns IP address 127.0.1.1 to the local nameserver process that it controls instead of 127.0.0.1. If the system’s /etc/resolv.conf is absent or is a static file instead of the symbolic link to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf installed by default then this static file will have to be updated by the administrator in order to continue using the NetworkManager-controlled nameserver.

Libvirt

• Windows vms which previously worked with ‘vga’ video now need ‘cirrus’ video.

Toolchain

• Python 2.7.3 includes a fix for a security vulnerability affecting Python’s dict and set implementations. Carefully crafted, untrusted input could lead to extremely long computation times and denials of service. Although disabled by default, vulnerable applications such as CGI scripts can explicitly enable “hash randomization” to prevent this exploit. Due to implementation details of this fix, virtualenvs created with older 2.7.x releases may not work with 2.7.3. Specifically, the os module may not appear to have a urandom function. This problem can be solved by recreating the broken virtualenvs with the newer Python 2.7.3 version. See http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 for full details. (954595)

VMware Player

• Installing either version 4 or 5 of VMware Player on Ubuntu 12.10 will trigger a crash report regarding lsb_release, because the lsb_release command uses Python 3 but the VMware installation environment overrides the Python settings to point to a bundled version of Python 2. (938869) It is unknown what impact this has on VMware Player at runtime.

Video Drivers

• Several video drivers are not functioning with some legacy chip-sets.
  • xserver-xorg-video-trident with some Trident Cyberblade chip-sets. Black screen and lock-up. Bugs
  • xserver-xorg-video-intel with i810 chip-sets. Segfault. 1060492
  • xserver-xorg-video-sis with 315 series (SiS 315/E/PRO, 550, [M]650, 651, 740, [M]661[FMG]X,[M]741[GX]) chip-sets. Black screen or loops around login screen. 1034812
• Workarounds
  • Test with a Live CD to see if your hardware is effected.
  • Trident Cyberblade – As the vesa driver doesn’t work with this chip-set the only solution is to remain with 12.04.
  • Intel i810 – A new install can only be accomplished from the Alternate ISO. On reboot go to Recovery Mode and delete/blacklist video driver. On reboot create suitable xorg.conf or use RandR to get correct resolution if necessary.
  • SiS 315 Series – As Intel i810

Common Infrastructure

• Up until Ubuntu 11.10, administrator access using the sudo tool was granted via the “admin” Unix group. In Ubuntu 12.04, administrator access will be granted via the “sudo” group. This makes Ubuntu more consistent with the upstream implementation and Debian. For compatibility purposes, the “admin” group will continue to provide sudo/administrator access in 12.04.
• Hibernate (suspend to disk) has been disabled by default, as it was found to be unreliable, very slow and confusing to have two suspend modes. See bug 812394 for details. If you want to re-enable it, please follow this recipe.
• pm-utils now has two new scripts to power down USB and various PCI devices in battery mode. A number of desktop packages were fixed to wake up less often. Both of these reduce power consumption and thus improve battery lifetime.
• resolvconf is now used to manage /etc/resolv.conf on all Ubuntu systems. You can learn more here
• Backports are now more easily accessible — to enable users to more easily receive new versions of software, the Ubuntu Backports repository is now enabled by default. Packages from backports will not be installed by default — they must explicitly be selected in package management software. However, once installed, packages from backports will automatically be upgraded to newer versions.
• DVD Images — the DVD images have been cleaned up significantly reducing their size to around 1.5GB to ease consumption. The remaining software remains available via download.

Linux v3.2.14 Kernel

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ships with an updated kernel moving from the mainline v3.0 series to the mainline v3.2 series. At release we are shipping with the Ubuntu 3.2.0-23.36 kernel which is based on the v3.2.14 upstream stable Linux kernel. The mainline v3.0 to v3.2 stable series update brings a number of new features. Some highlights include:

• ext4 gains support for larger base block sizes
• btrfs has more work addressing data integrity issues
• device mapper gains thin provisioning and recursive snapshots
• more work to improve performance under high writeback load
• networking improvements for congested networks
• ext3 moves to using filesystem barriers
• memory allocator improvements
• VFS scalability improvements
• a new iSCSI implementation
• software wait gains bad block management

Key changes in the Ubuntu kernel since the 3.0.0-12.20 Ubuntu kernel as shipped in the 11.10 Ubuntu release include:

• Rebase to upstream stable Linux kernel v3.2.14.
• The amd64 -generic and -server kernel flavors have been merged into a single -generic kernel flavor for Ubuntu 12.04. Given the few differences that existed between the two flavors, it only made sense to merge the two and reduce the overall maintenance burden over the life of this LTS release.
• Support for a new armhf kernel flavor has been introduced.
• The non-smp PowerPC kernel flavor has been removed. All hardware currently supported by the non-smp PowerPC kernel flavor should also be supported by the smp PowerPC kernel flavor.
• RC6 is enabled by default for Sandy Bridge systems. RC6 is a technology which allows the GPU to go into a very low power consumption state when the GPU is idle (down to 0W). It results in considerable power savings when this stage is activated. When comparing under idle loads with machine state where RC6 is disabled, improved power usage of around 40-60% has been witnessed.
• An improved set of jack detection patches has been backported from the upstream v3.3 Linux kernel.
• An updated AppArmor patch set has been included to better align with what is landing upstream.
• Applied and enabled the seccomp filters feature which uses the packet filtering machinery (BPF) to restrict access to system calls.
• A set of kexec fixes for arm from v3.3-rc1 has also been backported.
• We’ve also conducted an extensive review of Ubuntu kernel configs and made numerous config changes as a result.

Upstart 1.5

Upstart has been updated to version 1.5. More details are available in the Upstart Technical Overview.

GNU Toolchain

Ubuntu 12.04 is distributed with a default toolchain that includes: GCC 4.6.3 (and changes from Linaro GCC 4.6-2012.02), binutils 2.22, eglibc 2.15, and Linaro gdb 7.4-2012.04.

Compared to the 11.10 release the toolchain did see only incremental changes and bug fixes; comparing to the 10.04 LTS release, GCC updates include

• Updated frontends for better standards support (Ada 2012, Objective-C 2.0, improved experimental support for the upcoming C++0x ISO C++ standard, Fortran 2003 and 2008 improvements, new Go frontend)
• Improved optimizations, including better inter-procedural optimizations, and link time optimization (LTO).

Further information can be found upstream (GCC-4.6, GCC-4.5, binutils, gas, ld, gdb).

Python Toolchain

• Ubuntu 12.04 includes Python 2.7.3 and Python 3.2.3 Python 2.6 is no longer available for install.
• There is expanded support for Python 3 in this release, with Python 3 ports of python-dbus, python-feedparser, germinate, lazr.ui, wadllib, python-defer, python-keyring, and python-qt4 now included, among others.

Java Toolchain

The default run time for Java is OpenJDK 6b24 (IcedTea 1.11.1). OpenJDK 7u3 (IcedTea 2.1) is available in the archive as well.

Boot, Installation and Post-Installation

• [Dell Studio XPS 1340,Alienware m17x] Kernel panic and hang on boot due to the ite-cir driver. A patch has been sent upstream and a test kernel is referenced in the bug report. The fix will be immediately available as a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (984387)
• When closing the lid on a Unibody Macbook, the screen interacts with the touchpad. This can cause spurious gestures and clicks, and potentially lead to corrupted input driver state if the laptop suspends. To work around the issue, remove and reload the kernel module after resume by running:

  $ sudo rmmod bcm5974
  $ sudo modprobe bcm5974

  Note that this may disable some touchpad options, for example horizontal scrolling. These options can be re-enabled by visiting the Mouse and Touchpad settings. This is planned to be fixed in a post-release update (968845).

• Importing of existing Windows user accounts fails in some cases. (987902)

• Wubi (the Ubuntu installer for Windows) is not available as an option on the Ubuntu Desktop/DVD any more. Instead, it is now a separate download.

Upgrades

• Aptitude does not work on 64-bit systems without disabling multiarch in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch . (831768)
• If you have i386 packages installed on an amd64 system in Ubuntu 11.10, it is strongly recommended that you install the versions of apt and dpkg from oneiric-updates before upgrading. A number of multiarch-affecting upgrade issues have been fixed in those versions. (850264, 902603)
• In some cases update-manager might appear to hang indefinitely. In that case, open the expander at the bottom and check if there is a debconf question which needs to be answered. (979661)
• Upgrades from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS do not work using the alternate CD or the server CD as a package repository. It is recommended that users running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS wait for the 12.04.1 LTS point release, scheduled for July, before upgrading. (988941)

Kernel

• On ARM omap images, the networking support for the Beagle XM board is broken (838200)
• [Dell Studio XPS 1340,Alienware m17x] Kernel panic and hang on boot due to the ite-cir driver. A patch has been sent upstream and a test kernel is referenced in the bug report. The fix will be immediately available as a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (984387)
• Missing support for Sentelic touchpad in Asus K53U notebook. Patches have been backported and will be immediately available as a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (969334)
• Missing support for BCM20702A0 Broadcom bluetooth device [0489:e042]. A patch has been sent upstream. The fix will be immediately available as a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (980965)
• Buffer overflows in comedi driver. Patches have been backported from upstream and a test kernel is referenced in the bug report. The fix will be immediately available as a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (981234)
• Intel gma 4500mhd external monitor suffers from a scrambled picture. A patches has been backported from upstream. The fix will be immediately available as a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (796030)
• Kernel Oops – BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request; RIP: nfs_have_delegation+0x9/0x40 [nfs]. Some users attempting to run NFS clients on 12.04 appear to be affected. A test kernel is referenced from the bug report. Patches have been backported from upstream and will be immediately available in a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (974664)
• Patches from upstream stable v3.2.15 and v3.2.16 will undergo a baking period in the precise-proposed pocket during the first kernel SRU cycle. They will then be released as a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket approximately 3 weeks after 12.04 releases. (981162, 987337)
• hid-logitech-dj driver missing from the installer. It has been added to the d-i input-modules udeb and will be included in the 12.04.1 point release. (975198)
• rtl8187 driver missing from the installer. It has been added to the d-i nic-usb-modules udeb and will be included in the 12.04.1 point release. (971719)
• eGalaxis Touchscreen Driver does not work. Patches have been backported from upstream and will be immediately available in a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (913164)
• ATI/radeon framebuffers on PowerPC only enabled as modules and not built in. This results in issues such as booting to a command prompt, loss of tty consoles, and loss of suspend. A patch to build these in have been applied and will be immediately available in a kernel update from the precise-updates pocket following 12.04’s release. (949288)
• On systems with an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card the system will boot to a black screen. As a work around edit the kernel command line in the boot loader and add “nomodeset”. (725580)
• Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M 7400 and Maxdata 7000DX wireless RF kill handling triggers a kernel panic preventing wireless from operating correctly. This may be worked around by editing your kernel command line and adding “noexec=off”. (979253)
• Beagle XM systems which are capable of running at 1GHZ will be initialised at 800MHZ leading to slower than optimal performance. (771537)
• Some EFI systems fail to boot in EFI mode, BIOS mode is advised in these situations. (721576)