New image available: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (codenamed Bionic Beaver) has been released on 26th April 2018. This release is now available on Fuga Cloud.

Ubuntu 18.04 is the latest LTS version. LTS stands for Long Term Support, which means that these versions will receive updates and security fixes for a duration of 5 years, whereas the regular version will only be supported to 9 months after release. LTS versions are released every 2 years. The last LTS release was Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (codenamed Xenial Xerus).

Ubuntu Server changes

These are some of changes in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS relevant to Fuga users. For the complete overview, see the release notes for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

netplan.io

One of the biggest changes that you will notice is that ifupdown has been replaced with netplan.io. For most usecases you don’t have to change anything here, but in more complex setups you might want more control over your network configuration:

The old ifupdown configuration was located in /etc/network/interfaces. This will now display a warning that it has been depricated.

root@ubuntu1804:~# cat /etc/network/interfaces
# ifupdown has been replaced by netplan(5) on this system.  See
# /etc/netplan for current configuration.
# To re-enable ifupdown on this system, you can run:
#    sudo apt install ifupdown

A netplan.io config can now be found in /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml.

root@ubuntu1804:~# cat /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml
# This file is generated from information provided by
# the datasource.  Changes to it will not persist across an instance.
# To disable cloud-init's network configuration capabilities, write a file
# /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfg with the following:
# network: {config: disabled}
network:
    version: 2
    ethernets:
        ens3:
            dhcp4: true
            match:
                macaddress: fa:16:3e:b6:2d:ea
            set-name: ens3

More information on netplan.io can be found here.

QEMU 2.11.1

QEMU has been updated to the 2.11.1 release.

QEMU in Ubuntu 18.04 now has RDMA support enabled as over the past year much unification in the RDMA-core project has occured.

Migrations from former versions are supported just as usual. When upgrading it is always recommended to upgrade the machine types, allowing guests to fully benefit from all the improvements and fixes of the most recent version.

libvirt 4.0

libvirt has been updated to version 4.0. The packaging now builds libvirt storage drivers as pluggable libraries. This slims down the installation requirements but some drivers of less general interest will now be found in universe. (ex: gluster, sheepdog, zfs)

Chrony

The recommended server for the NTP protocol on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now Chrony in stead of NTPD. It is highly recommended not to change this back to NTPD, as NTPD will only receive best-effort security maintenance from now on.

cloud-init

The version was updated to 18.2. Notable new features include:

• New cloud-init command-line tools available: status, analyze and clean

Nginx

Nginx was updated to version 1.14.0. New features include the mirror module, HTTP/2 push, and the gRPC proxy module.

PHP

PHP was updated to version 7.2.x.

Apache

Apache was updated to version 2.4.29. Additionally, HTTP/2 support is now enabled in 18.04.