XPS 13 9350 DE: is upgrade to kernel 4.4.0-38 officially supported ?

I'm using my xps 13 9350 DE with the shipped Dell-ubuntu 14.04 (+ proposed updates) Recently the OS proposed an update concerning 1404_HWE_EOL, which I accepted, and in effect it has installed the new kernel 4.4.0-38. My question is : is this upgrade officially supported by Dell ?

I think you mean this update window? At least this is what I am currently getting and I'm also unsure regarding what consequences this might have and whether or not I'm going to break things when clicking "ok" ... or "install" ...

@DELL: How should we customer proceed? What is the recommended way of dealing with the end of life (EOL) of the hardware enablement stack (HWE)?

yes, exactly. The first time, I clicked OK, and as far as I can tell, it did nothing.

Then the second time I clicked Install, and it did install a bunch of packages, including the new kernel 4.4

Thanks for your feedback, VNS35! Actually, I'm a little bit worried about the possible side effects of the install. On the other hand, many people installed 16.04 from scratch and that seems to work, too (runs a 4.4+ kernel IMO). However, this does not automatically has to work in this case, because that's a slightly different scenario. I'm mentioning this because in July I also just updated to a newer Kernel via the software updater and this rendered my XPS13DE (2016) unusable and, at the end, required a time-consuming re-install.

That is, I hope that DELL can explain whether or not we can safely click "install" and if this is the supported way, as already asked in your opening post.

Best

i am on kernel 4.4 with ubuntu 14.04 on my xps 13 de 2016 since 5 days or so. 

no big problems so far. graphics seems to work better. at least i can play trine2 (steam) now without graphic issues. no problems with wifi or audio on suspend/resume. 

i just feel a little bit more battery drain then on 3.x kernels.
has dell made some optimizations on the 3.x kernels related to power save for the skylake platform?
i read about some issues with the cpu states and NVMe ssd.

I did notice an important change. In kernel 3.19.0-69, the cpu regulation driver was set to acpi-cpufreq, while in the new 4.4.0-38, it is set to intel_pstate (as recommended by Intel, afaict). The difference is huge: I made a test with encoding a video with avconv, here are the results:

* with 3.19.0-69, encoding rate is 133fps, CPU temperature reaches 89°C but quickly fans start and temp stabilizes at 75°C average. Total time for encoding 10min.

* with 4.4.0-38, encoding rate is 191fps, temperature reaches 95°C, and then stabilizes to 90°C (except peak at 100°C just before the end of encoding). Total time for encoding 7min !

So yes, this is now much faster, but maybe the CPU will burn... (and certainly worse for battery life)

UP...

please Dell what do you recommend ?

stay with 3.19 or go with 4.4 ?

there is a not dell related issues with kernel 4.4 and some intel gpus like the skylake architecture. in chrome based browsers, hardware acceleration is not working well. if enabled (by default) you will get some screen flickering on websites with heavy graphical content or videos. if disabled, the browser is very unresponsive.there are a lot of workaround out there for this, but none of theme worked for me.
the only thing i can do so far to get ride of the flickering, is not to use the browser with window maximized.

Any chance of getting an official Dell response to this? My machine is fine the way it is, so I don't want to risk screwing it up, but I'm also not pleased with the idea of getting no more updates.

Ok ... but I'm still stuck behind the message posted above. It seems that I either need to upgrade to the new kernel, or I'll get no updates.

I got confirmation yesterday that for OEM systems Canonical is still providing security updates for the 3.19 kernel. They are working on transitioning OEM users to 4.4 later this year. Some users were accidentally upgraded to 4.4 due to a mistake Canonical made, but that has been fixed.

Hi Jared, thanks for the update.

Could you explain what it means " Some users were accidentally upgraded to 4.4 due to a mistake Canonical made, but that has been fixed" ?

I am one of those who " were accidentally upgraded to 4.4". Am I supposed to manually remove 4.4 ? Is it safe ?

i am really confused now. i am on 4.4 and as i mentioned here i found some grafik improvements after the kernel upgrade (mesa drivers have been updated as well with the kernel). but then i run into this chrome flickering thing because of the new kernel, at least this is what i thought. i m using meanly opera but since its base on chrome the flickering is here as well and in visual studio code too, as i found out the last days. so it gets really annoying whith this flickering. so i started ubuntu with the latest 3.x kernel via grub. and now i have here the exact same behavior in chrome based apps and on the other side, the grafik improvements are still here. so it looks like all the stuff is related to the mesa driver update and not to the kernel it self ???

so the only thing the kernel update has changed ist the cpu governor settings and the touch-pad recognition ???

for the touch-pad thing on 4.4 there is an easy fix (https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2316240)

but whats with the cpu governor/management ??? is kernel 4.4 save to use for our hardware (skylake) ??? 

please dell help us out with this.

thanx in advanced.

I got confirmation yesterday that for OEM systems Canonical is still providing security updates for the 3.19 kernel. They are working on transitioning OEM users to 4.4 later this year. Some users were accidentally upgraded to 4.4 due to a mistake Canonical made, but that has been fixed.

Jared, I don't understand this either. I still get the message box as shown in my screenshot at the beginning of this thread and I apparently don't have another option except clicking that "Install..." button. Of course I didn't click that button yet but, at the same time, I didn't receive any package updates either since the message box first appeared 2-3 weeks ago.

What should we customer do: click or wait?

Thanks!

Soooo ... what's the story here?

I suppose it means that nobody at Dell knows yet...

which is ok, this is a difficult question, I just don't understand why they don't say it.