If they don't use 3.14 they won't have complete Intel broadwell support. Since those chips will come out and be the primary source of new 14.04 installs, they either need to release a point release with a new kernel around the product launch or get 3.14 in now.

Of course they could backport those patches to their kernel.

The kernel and X stack get regular backports over the life of the LTS release (since Precise):

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

I think that would then be the first time that Ubuntu LTS is piggybacking on an LTS kernel. With 3.12 already 6 months old that seems unlikely to me given Ubuntu's usual attempts to support modern hardware.

FWIW I'm already using 14.04 beta2, and the kernel there is 3.13.0-20. This means the stable version will be 3.14, doesn't it?

Kernel freeze is April second so this means that they "should" be able to update the kernel to 3.14 but its Ubuntu and you never know.

Why would you conclude that?

I remembered odd versions were unstable, but looking at the kernel info, 3.13 is a stable version. So I'm guessing they'll stick with that.

> I remembered odd versions were unstable

this stopped being true very long ago (with the beginning of the 2.6 series)

TIL :)

I upgraded to the 14.04 LTS beta and uname -r returns 3.13.0-19-lowlatency for me.