Exceptional respins of Ubuntu 17.10 media; call for testing

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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-release/attachments/20180105/61be354e/attachment.sig>