Linux 4.2 Inching Closer To Landing In Ubuntu 15.10

The Ubuntu Kernel Team is still preparing to land Linux 4.2 within Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" for its release in October.

There are many new features to Linux 4.2 and the Ubuntu Kernel Team has been working to get their packages into shape so it can be incorporated into Ubuntu 15.10.

The minutes from today's kernel team meeting indicate, "We have rebased our Wily master-next branch to the latest upstream v4.2-rc6 and uploaded to our ~canonical-kernel-team PPA. We are still fixing up DKMS packages before we proceed uploading to the archive."

Linux 4.2-rc6 was released this past Sunday and for now it looks like Linux 4.2 should be officially released in two weeks. As usual, I continue to do daily Linux kernel benchmarks on both Fedora and Ubuntu of the development code over on LinuxBenchmarking.com.

The DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) packages are for out-of-tree kernel modules. One of the big packages that at times tends to hold up Linux kernel upgrades for Ubuntu (and X.Org Server upgrades) is the AMD Catalyst driver. So far Catalyst doesn't officially support Linux 4.2 with either an updated public driver nor have I seen any patches from the community, including the Arch folks with their usually bleeding-edge Catalyst kernel patches. Hopefully AMD will end up sending Canonical another driver pre-release in the near future, as they have done in the past for supporting upcoming Ubuntu releases.

The feature freeze for Ubuntu 15.10 is 20 August along with the Debian Import Freeze. The kernel freeze is on 8 October and the official Ubuntu 15.10 release is expected on 22 October.