End of July Canonical released the fix update for their first mainframe release. No new features but a lot of fixes, for Linux on z many installation fixes. If you are using (or planning to use) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS it's time to think about the life cycle. Here is the support map from Ubuntu Wiki:
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| Source: Ubuntu Wiki as of 9/5/2016, License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License |
My recommendation is the following:
- For production use stay with 16.04.1 stream for the life of the product. Plan for a check point in spring 2018 and check if you need the additional hardware enablement delivered with the 16.04.5 kernel.
- For development use you probably want the latest kernel anyhow. There 16.04.2-16.04.4 are valid choices. However I'd rather upgrade everything and go with the 16.10, 17.04, 17.10 versions. This will give you the latest versions of all the open source packages as well.