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Ubuntu 24.04 lts Noble Numbat

Canonical has released version 24.04 of Ubuntu. 'Noble Numbat' is a long term support release that is based on Linux kernel 6.8 and uses Gnome 46 as the desktop environment. The LTS release will receive support for five years, but this can be extended by five years with a free Ubuntu Pro subscription. One of the biggest changes is that 24.04 has a new installer based on Flutter, but of course there are many more changes. Below are the release notes.

These release notes for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu and its flavors.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until June 2029. If you need Long Term Support, we recommend you use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 760 until 24.04.1 is released.

Upgrades

Users of Ubuntu 23.10 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 24.04 soon after the release.
Users of 22.04 LTS however will be offered the automatic upgrade when 24.04.1 LTS is released, which is scheduled for the 15th of August.

New features in 24.04 LTS

Year 2038 support for the armhf architecture

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS solves the Year 2038 problem 319 that existed on armhf. More than a thousand packages have been updated to handle time using a 64-bit value rather than a 32-bit one, making it possible to handle times up to 292 billion years in the future.

Updated Packages< /h2>

Linux kernel

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS includes the new 6.8 Linux kernel that brings many new features.

Detailed changes are reported in the Noble Kernel Release Notes post.< /p>

systemd v255.4

The init system was updated to systemd v255.4. See the upstream changelog 92 for more information about individual features.

Netplan v1.0

The network stack was updated to Netplan version 1.0 82. Supporting simultaneous WPA2 & WPA3, Mellanox VF-LAG for high-performance SR-IOV networking and VXLAN improvements. It also provides a stable libnetplan1 API 6 and a new netplan status –diff sub-command to find differences between configuration and system state. For more information please see the Introducing Netplan v1.0 88 blog post.

Toolchain Upgrades

OpenJDK

OpenJDK LTS 21 is the default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS while maintaining support for versions 17, 11, and 8. OpenJDK 17 and 21 are also TCK certified, which means they adhere to Java standards and ensure interoperability with other Java platforms. A special FIPS-compliant OpenJDK 11 package is also available for Ubuntu Pro users.

.NET

With the introduction of .NET 8, Ubuntu is taking a significant step forward in supporting the .NET community. .NET 8 will be fully supported on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 22.04 LTS for the entire lifecycle of both releases. This enables developers to upgrade their applications to newer .NET versions before upgrading their Ubuntu release. Starting with 24.04 LTS the .NET support has also been extended to the IBM System Z platform.

.NET 6 and .NET 7 packages with limited support are available via a PPA 16.

Apport

Apport added integration with systemd-coredump to handle crashes. Developers on Ubuntu can co-install systemd-coredump now and use coredumpctl to analyze crash data. Apport will continue to collect crash information and submit it to the Ubuntu Error Tracker and Launchpad.

Security Improvements

Unprivileged user namespace restrictions

In combination with the apparmor package, the Ubuntu kernel now restricts the use of unprivileged user namespaces. This affects all programs on the system that are unprivileged and unconfined. A default AppArmor profile is provided that allows the use of user namespaces for unprivileged and unconfined applications but will deny the subsequent use of any capabilities within the user namespace. A common use case for unprivileged user namespaces is applications that construct their own sandboxes or work with styles of container workloads. As such, AppArmor profiles that allow the use of unprivileged user namespaces are also provided for common applications and frameworks that come from the Ubuntu archive, as well as popular third party applications like Google Chrome, Discord and others. This is a subsequent step towards trying to mitigate the larger attack surface presented by unprivileged user namespaces (the first being the introduction of this feature in Ubuntu 23.10 where it was not enabled by default).

Whilst significant effort has been expanded to try and identify all applications that may require such profiles, it is expected that there may be cases where additional profiles are required.

In this case, there are several options if you run into problems:< /p>

TLS 1.0, 1.1 and DTLS 1.0 are forcefully disabled< /h3>
  • for software using openssl this was the case since 20.04
  • for software using gnutls, this is now enforced (with openconnect being a notable exception)

More consistent application of openssl and gnutls system configurations

Some libraries do not raise errors when their configuration is not accessible; this could happen when apparmor does not allow access to the configuration files. Due to how widespread openssl and gnutls are, the apparmor rules now grant access to their configuration files by default. Their system-wide configuration will therefore be followed better.

Deprecation and disablement of 1024-bit RSA APT repository signing keys

APT in 24.04 requires repositories to be signed with the RSA keys no smaller than 2048 bits, Ed25519, or Ed448. As work to redesign old Launchpad PPAs with a stronger keys is still ongoing for some weeks, this is initially only a warning.

Once Launchpad PPAs have been adopted, you will need to manually migrate any affected PPAs to new signing keys by removing and re-adding them to quiesce the warning.

The final APT 2.8.0 release that converts the warning to an error should be published as a stable release update some time after the resigning is complete.

pptpd removed

For more details, please see related upstream changelogs:

Ruby 3.2

The default ruby ​​interpreter had been updated to version 3.2.3. There are many new features and bug fixes, some highlights are:

There are some constants and methods that were already deprecated and now they are removed, when migrating to this ruby ​​version be careful with the following:

All the above was removed from Ruby 3.2 and cannot be used anymore. For more information, please see the upstream release announcement 4.

Runc

The runc package was updated to version 1.1.12. It contains bug fixes specially related to the cgroup v2 support, and most importantly, it adds support for riscv64. For more information, please see the upstream changelog 3.

For users/developers willing to customize the runc package, the source package is now split into runc (library package) and runc-app (application package). This was done to follow what was done in containerd and docker.io 20, and therefore, ease the future maintenance, including backports to stable releases.

Samba

The Samba package has been updated to the 4.19.x series. Here are the upstream release notes for 4.19.0: https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.19.0.html 12

Due to the GlusterFS demotion (see LP: #2045063 8 and the GlusterFS section of these release notes), the samba packaging had to be changed a bit to accommodate this change.

The GlusterFS VFS modules which were previously shipped in the binay samba-vfs-modules package, are now shipped in the new binary package called samba-vfs-modules-extra. Specifically, these modules (and their respective manual pages) were moved to samba-vfs-modules-extra:

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