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I am looking to buy a new laptop with i5-8250 (coffee lake) and installing Ubuntu 16.04.

At the moment 16.04 is using the kernel 4.10-hwe. Is there temporary support for it in the current hwe? I rather not upgrade my kernel if possible.

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  • Nope, I don't think so. Your best bet would be 18.04 when released, or the development branch now. Dec 1, 2017 at 7:54
  • I might have to use hwe-edge kernel. Dec 1, 2017 at 8:43
  • Did you end up doing this? What kernel did you end up using?
    – Elder Geek
    Aug 21, 2018 at 3:46

2 Answers 2

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This question got my attention as I've designed and built a system based on the Coffee Lake CPU.Testing indicates that while 16.04.1 installs just fine, it fails to reboot after removing the installation media and hitting Enter Upon Power cycling the system it booted and rebooted and shut down as expected with kernel v.4.4.0-134-generic. After updating and upgrading to 16.04.5 it still works as expected. I upgraded the kernel with sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-16.04 which upgraded the kernel to 4.15.033-generic #36 which immediately broke the graphics (tried and failed to boot in low graphics mode). I also tried linux-generic-hwe-16.04-edge with identical unfortunate results.

Research indicated that you would need a newer kernel than 4.10 and might have to add i915.alpha_support=1 to the kernel flags after (or before) quiet splash in /etc/defaults/grub on the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line [which may work.] (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1728313) This does not appear to be accurate (at least on the hardware I chose which is listed below) and may be just a problem with Wayland (which was short-lived and didn't exist in 16.04 and was dropped from 18.04.

Reportedly this is fixed in kernel 4.15 whereby the Coffee Lake Graphics are no longer treated as Alpha. It might also interest you that in reference to this comment, Dell is selling Kaby Lake / Coffee Lake developer systems with Ubuntu 18.04 preinstalled. Unless of course you (like me) absolutely insist on designing and building your own gear in which case it's far from interesting.

EDIT:

I built a Coffee Lake system and can confirm that both 16.04.1 and 18.04.1 work fine, however I cannot recommend the hwe kernels at this time. Note that all testing was done via fresh installation.

For those who are interested these are the components I chose (The drives I had on the shelf)I had also ordered a Patriot SCORCH M.2 2280 128GB PCIe 3.0 x2 with NVMe but it won't arrive until later. It will be interesting to see how it compares to the ~52similar less than stellar0 MB/sec I'm getting off the OCZ drive.

Motherboard: Gigabyte H310M-S2P
CPU: Intel Core i3-8100 3.6GHz quad core
RAM: Geil EVO POTENZA 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4
SSD: OCZ-SOLID3
DVDRW: ASUS DRW-24B1ST
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Well, I write this by using an i3-8300 with Asus ROG STRIX H370-I GAMING (see the entire configuration) with Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS - conclusion, it works :).

$uname -a
Linux adr-desktop 4.15.0-46-generic #49~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 12 17:45:24 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

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