Canonical fleshed out its latest Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) platform, touting expanded security and functionality updates to its widely-used Linux operating system. Company CEO Mark Shuttleworth also dusted off the vendor’s planned initial public offering pledge that sat dormant through the pandemic.

Ubuntu is Canonical’s distribution system for Linux designed to run on computing devices, network servers, and in the cloud. The platform uses a naming scheme based on the year and month of the release, thus this latest update is dubbed 22.04. The release also earns an LTS designation, which signifies a larger platform release. The company is using a two-year cycle on these LTS updates, with the last one (20.04) released in April 2020.

On the security front, Canonical proudly touted that the latest Ubuntu update was the only Linux distribution that supports Microsoft’s Azure confidential virtual machine (VM) project. It enables Ubuntu images on Azure to leverage hardware cryptographic capabilities from AMD CPUs to provide VM memory isolation at runtime. It also uses Ubuntu full-disk encryption and secure boots to provide VM confidentially at rest and during launch.

For the end user, this allows them to protect their data and code from other VMs, from a cloud provider’s infrastructure, including their hypervisor and firmware, and from that cloud provider’s employees who might have access to a customer’s VM or physical machine.

The Ubuntu update has also been optimized for Arm architectures that are becoming increasingly attractive to hyperscalers as an option for larger enterprises. Canonical specifically cited Amazon Web Services with its Graviton chip as taking advantage of this new optimization.

Canonical also released a beta version of its LTE real-time kernel targeted at telecommunications operators that are migrating their networks toward 5G. Intel noted that it has used the kernel to help validate its FlexRAN software development kit for open radio access network deployments.

Maciej Mazur, telecom product manager at Canonical, explained that the work has targeted edge use cases that require low latency and low power consumption.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, who beamed in and out of the press briefing due to a wonky network connection that he blamed on a “radio link from small island off the coast of West Africa,” did stay connected long enough to state that the company still planned to move on a long-simmering IPO. He stated that he was “pretty confident” it would occur at some point next year.

“We are not in a situation where we need to raise money, so we won't be going public as a fundraising exercise,” Shuttleworth explained, adding that the move was really to help the company better handle “the responsibilities that I think we now have in the global tech market.”

As an example, Shuttleworth said that Canonical fielded 110,000 applications last year, and was on track to nearly double that amount this year.

“So we really are feeling the stresses and strains of that kind of demand and growth,” Shuttleworth said. “And we're very committed to the idea that as we grow, we're not going to do that in a way which is shallow or causes problems for us further down the line. We are quite conservative in how we grow so culturally we continue to stay anchored and technologically we are able to keep delivering to the standard that people have come to expect.”