A new update is waiting for Ubuntu users

Dec 19, 2014 22:15 GMT  ·  By

A Linux kernel regression for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) has been identified by Canonical and the developers have issued a patch that should be available through regular channels.

Canonical lands numerous kernel updates during the development cycle of an Ubuntu version and it's likely that some of those will probably cause problems due to some unforeseen circumstances. That's quite normal and it's one of the reasons for the existence of these regression fixes.

"USN-2448-1 fixed vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. Due to an unrelated regression TCP Throughput drops to zero for several drivers after upgrading. This update fixes the problem. We apologize for the inconvenience," is noted in Ubuntu's security advisory.

The previous update mentioned that "an information leak in the Linux kernel was discovered that could leak the high 16 bits of the kernel stack address on 32-bit Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) paravirt guests." This is just one of the issues.

Due to an unavoidable ABI change, the kernel packages have a new version number, which will force you to reinstall and recompile all third-party kernel modules you might have installed. Moreover, if you use the linux-restricted-modules package, you have to update it as well to get modules that work with the new Linux kernel version.

This is especially true if you manually installed the NVIDIA drivers, for example, in which case you will have to recompile the headers.

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