Canonical engineer Serkan Uygungelen published a post outlining some of the Intel Xeon CPU features to be supported by the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, some Xeon features already supported by the existing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and some features only partially supported for still not having packaged user-space libraries/support within the Ubuntu archive.
For those wanting a quick rundown of the Ubuntu Linux support for recent Intel Xeon server CPU features, Uygungelen’s post is useful for a quick primer — especially around the varying Intel Xeon accelerators and other IP found in their recent server hardware. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is largely in good shape for supporting the latest Intel Xeon CPU capabilities but for a few of them they may have the needed kernel support but as of now the user-space packages aren’t yet found in the Ubuntu archive so it means using third-party package repositories from Intel or similar, or compiling the user-space bits yourself.
The key highlights include:
– Since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has been base functionality for Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) but there hasn’t been mainlined support for the necessary user-space packages. Intel maintains its own APT repository for the Intel SGX SDK. There is a packaging request to add a “linux-sgx” package for Intel SGX user-space support to Ubuntu Linux. But it’s not clear that this user-space SGX packaging will be ready in time for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS next month.
– Intel DSA 2.0 support is available in Ubuntu 25.10 and the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
– Intel IAA 2.0 support is found in recent versions of Ubuntu Linux with the necessary kernel bits. But the Intel Query Processing Library (QPL) user-space code isn’t yet packaged within the Ubuntu archive.
– CXL 2.0 support is available in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the HWE kernel stack for Linux 6.9+ and will also be part of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
– Ubuntu Linux has long supported AVX2.
– Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support will be enabled in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS following the preview support in Ubuntu 25.10.
– Intel DPLL (Digital Phase-Locked Loop) framework support will be found in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
– Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) Gen 4 and Gen 5 is already supported in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
The post in full can be found on the Ubuntu Discourse.
