Exceptional respins of Ubuntu 17.10 media; call for testing

Steve Langasek steve.langasek at ubuntu.com
Fri Jan 5 23:51:58 UTC 2018


Dear developers,

As many of you are aware, in late November it came to our attention that a
bug in Ubuntu 17.10 was leading users to be locked out of their BIOS
settings.

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1734147

This bug can be triggered merely by booting the live image without even
installing, and has the potential to make a user's system unbootable either
immediately or in the future.  While the affected machines are believed to
always be recoverable via software, this is not straightforward and is very
difficult to communicate to users who may be in the situation of having
their laptop no longer be bootable.

In addition to providing a kernel update which disables the intel-spi driver
at build time, we have taken the precaution of disabling downloads for the
17.10 images from the ubuntu.com download page, and I am in the process of
making available respun 17.10 images for all flavors.

  http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/385/builds

The target release date for these updated images is Thursday, January 11.
If your flavor would like to participate in the coordinated release of these
re-released images, please put them through the usual testing to confirm
that they are usable.  (It is not required that flavors participate in this
re-release of 17.10, but I would strongly encourage it.)


Note that these images are being prepared in advance of the release of fixes
for Spectre and Meltdown.  As a rule, we do not re-release install media for
security bugs, even those as severe as this; Ubuntu 17.10 install media
without the Meltdown fix will be in the same category as Ubuntu 14.04.5 and
Ubuntu 16.04.3 install media which also do not include the fix.  Also, it is
beneficial to have Ubuntu 17.10 images available again ASAP in the face of
the impending 17.04 EOL.

  https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2018-January/000227.html

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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