This week sees the (belated) release of Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, the first point release update in the noble series to bring an updated hardware enablement (HWE) stack with it.

Ubuntu’s HWE backports newer1 Linux kernel and Mesa GPU drivers to LTS users to ensure the latest LTS release works with the latest hardware.

Soon, HWE updates may bundle a wider range of Intel graphics driver updates.

Canonical engineer Shane McKee this week put forward a proposal to expand Ubuntu HWE updates to loop in a broader set of graphics driver packages specifically supporting Intel hardware in LTS releases2.

The move would help ensure users on the latest Ubuntu LTS—be they home, business, enterprise, etc— benefit from and have access to the latest features in the latest Intel hardware for the first couple of years of an Ubuntu long-term support period.

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Not that it’d solely be about new-hardware, of course.

Intel graphics driver updates also include fixes, fine-tuning, and the occasional new feature for existing/older Intel hardware as well.

Since Mesa, which provides open-source graphics drivers for Intel and other GPUs, is part of the HWE stack already, the idea here is to provide a ‘multi-package recipe’ that compliments it, adding a raft of extra Intel packages supporting other features.

“Whenever new Intel graphics hardware is introduced, support for that hardware must be added in the kernel as well as in these userspace packages. Without these efforts, baseline functionalities […] would not work on new hardware,” says McKee.

“Since users often prefer LTS releases, these packages need periodic backporting to ensure prompt support for their new hardware at time of launch.”

The packages earmarked for inclusion so far:

  • Intel Compute Runtime (intel-compute-runtime)
  • Intel Graphics Compiler (intel-graphics-compiler)
  • Intel Media Driver (intel-media-driver + -non-free)
  • VA-API (libva, libva-utils)
  • oneTBB Threaded Building Blocks (onetbb)
  • oneAPI Level Zero (level-zero)
  • VC Intrinsics project (intel-vc-intrinsics)
  • Intel Video Processing Library (libvpl, libvpl-tools)
  • Intel VPL GPU Runtime (onevpl-intel-gpu)
  • Intel Graphics Memory Management Library (intel-gmmlib)

For now this is just a proposal. You won’t see the above list of packages bumped/added/updated in the latest HWE stack update—which rolled out as a software update to existing installs a few weeks ago—in this week’s Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS release.

Given Canonical’s commitment to periodical hardware updates to bolster the longevity and utility of all Ubuntu LTS releases, adding additional Intel driver updates to the HWE feels logical.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

  1. Backported from the latest stable short-term Ubuntu release so it is newer than the kernel included in the LTS/previouw HWE but it is the latest mainline stable kernel release. ↩︎
  2. HWE updates and refreshed ISOs form ‘point releases’. These bridge LTS releases. Each LTS gets 5 point releases over ~3 years, but only 4 include new HWE. ↩︎