The Ubuntu 24.04 Linux distribution is out today, marking the first major Long Term Support (LTS) release for the widely deployed operating system in two years.

An LTS is an enterprise grade release of Ubuntu, providing hardened security and long-term support that goes beyond what the non-LTS editions provide. Ubuntu puts out a new release every six months, with the last release being the 23.10 Manic Minotaur that debuted last October.

With the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, codenamed the “Noble Numbat,” Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, is promising up to 12 years of support, making the release an ideal platform for enterprises and telcos to base mission-critical deployments on, both on-premises and in the cloud.

“Performance is a key value of Ubuntu and we have made improvements throughout the stack,” Oliver Smith, product manager for Ubuntu, told SDxCentral. “By shipping the latest Linux 6.8 kernel we’re also benefiting from a host of performance enhancements from upstream, augmented by our enablement of low-latency kernel features in our generic kernel.”

The performance improvements that the Linux 6.8 kernel provides are augmented by a series of updates to critical performance tools that are now included by default to make them more accessible for site reliability engineers.

“Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is designed to be a haven for performance engineering out of the box,” Smith said.

One such performance update is a feature for enabling frame-pointers by default on all 64-bit architectures. Smith said that capability provides more complete CPU and off-CPU profiling, increasing the visibility and auditability of workloads as well as helping to identify areas for optimization within the Linux distribution itself.

Going a step further he noted that thanks to Canonical’s close partnerships with silicon vendors like Intel, Ubuntu is able to take advantage of hardware-specific features. One such feature is Intel Quick Assist Technology, which accelerates encryption and compression performance on 4th Gen and newer Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

The partnership with hardware vendors also has cloud implications.

“Ubuntu is the first and only OS to support Nvidia H100 GPUs on the public cloud, starting with Microsoft Azure,” Smith said. “Thanks to this offering, businesses can undertake various tasks including ML training, inference, confidential multi-party data analytics and federated learning with confidence.”

Ubuntu is also widely deployed in the cloud for all manner of general purpose workloads. With the 24.04 update, the cloud minimal images have been reduced in size by 30% enabling efficient deployments.

Security is another core area of focus in the 24.04 update.

Building upon the strong security foundation laid by previous LTS releases, Ubuntu 24.04 introduces numerous improvements aimed at safeguarding systems against an ever-evolving threat landscape.

One of the key focus areas is restricting the abuse of unprivileged user namespaces, a Linux kernel feature that has sometimes been exploited to gain elevated privileges. While permitted for legitimate use cases, Ubuntu 24.04 denies access to additional permissions within these namespaces, limiting potential attack surfaces.

Binary hardening has also received significant attention. The FORTIFY_SOURCE compiler flag has been raised to level 3, enabling more comprehensive detection of memory safety violations across a wider range of common functions like memcpy() and snprintf(). Additionally, the ARM64 architecture now benefits from hardware-enforced pointer authentication and branch target identification to mitigate code reuse attacks.

AppArmor, Ubuntu's mandatory access control system, sees a major version upgrade to 4.0. It introduces granular network access control, complex policy conditionals, and the capability to defer access decisions to userspace programs, enabling advanced security models like interactive file access prompting.

Addressing vulnerabilities in cryptographic protocols, Ubuntu 24.04 disables obsolete and insecure TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1, along with DTLS 1.0, to prevent downgrade attacks that could expose sensitive data.

“Over the last 20 years, Ubuntu has become the Linux distribution of choice for enterprises, academic institutions, developers and hobbyists thanks to its core values of security, performance, stability, privacy and usability,” Smith said. “Our mission is to deliver the best platform for open source innovation for decades to come.”