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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 24.04 is the current LTS release. Our are you intending to say that Ubuntu, regardless of version, is not up to date?

Edit: "LTS" added due to popular demand

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You need a qualifier there — the latest Ubuntu release is 25.04, but 24.04 is the current LTS release.

It is up to date, with security patches and fixes. That is obviously what is relevant here. That is why the parent comment got down voted, since it is up to date in context of a security vulnerability. It should be even more secure, since new software versions might introduce unknown attack vectors.

I am saying that any version of Ubuntu is not representative of the mainline kernel, which is what is relevant when it comes to analyzing current mitigations.

Distro LTS releases often mean custom kernels, backports, hardware enablement, whatnot, which makes it effectively a fork.

Unless were interested in discovering kernel variation discrepancies, its more interesting to analyze mainline.

I'd expect an awful lot of production workloads to be running on LTS kernel versions (and likely also LTS distro releases). So the mitigations currently available in an LTS release of a mainstream distro are quite relevant.

They are running their LTS distro's LTS kernel, but that us not an upstream thing

On an LTS, you'll be running a Canonical kernel, or a Red Hat kernel, or a SuSE kernel, or an Oracle kernel, or...

Each will have different backports, different hardware enablement, different random patches of choice, and so different bugs and problems.

Unless were evaluating the security of a particular distro release, mainline is what is Linux and will ultimately be the shared base for future releases.

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