Ubuntu 25.04 has been unsupported for nearly two months. How will sprites get security and feature upgrades?

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In my sprites, more /etc/lsb-release says

…. DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION=“Ubuntu 25.04”

But Ubuntu 25.04 has been unsupported for nearly two months, since Jan 15 2026.

I created another sprite and it was unsupported from the get-go. Not a good look…

The question in a few other queries here (now closed) is, how will sprites get security and feature upgrades?

And when you roll out a new base VM, how can we most efficiently move / port / test our stuff for a new sprite? Can we re-use the old name somehow?

Sprites are awesome, but this is a pretty big issue right now.

(I just started this new topic for the third tim, my first one on Feb 1 went unanswered for 7 days and was auto-closed. The same happened to my second, after 2 weeks, no at at least included some details on what happens when you upgrade via Ubuntu. Let’s keep this one alive.)

Thanks

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Also, Working with Sprites | Sprites incorrectly says that sprites run Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

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I think you use sprite upgrade -all to upgrade everything, including the OS. I can’t remember where I saw that, but I think it was in a release note or in a GitHub PR.

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I upgraded from 0.0.1-rc31 → v0.0.1-rc39 and created a new sprite. Same thing: Ubuntu 25.04.

I ran this command and got an error:

$ sprite upgrade -all
flag provided but not defined: -all
Usage of upgrade:
-channel string
Release channel (release, rc, dev). Defaults to current channel.
-check
Check for updates without installing
-force
Force upgrade even if already up to date
-h    Show help for this command (shorthand)
-help
Show help for this command
-version string
Upgrade to a specific version

I don’t see much info about channels, but my version string suggests I’m on the “rc” channel.

So I tried the bleeding-edge dev channel:

sprite upgrade --channel dev
Checking for updates…
Migrating configuration from version 1 to 1…
Latest version: 0.0.1-dev-e00b1ac
Current version: v0.0.1-rc39
Downloading sprite-linux-amd64.tar.gz…
Installing new version…
Successfully upgraded to version 0.0.1-dev-e00b1ac

and got the same Ubuntu version when creating another new sprite yet again

So it is indeed frustrating to see no offical response over the last month to this issue, combined with the erroneous info at Working with Sprites | Sprites

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We’ve been working on this behind the scenes, but should’ve reached out earlier. The short answer is: new Sprites will start shipping Ubuntu 25.10 “soon” (some time this week, depends on the other release schedules and how fast your region’s pool cycles).

The two main blockers with 25.10 were uutils compatibility and upstream moving to Rockcraft for building the base Ubuntu images. While each Sprite gets its own VM, the user environment lives in a lightweight container. Those containers init using tini, which we bundle with the parent Machine’s Pilot. To ship 25.10, we’ve reworked our image pipeline. We now build images directly from the rootfs tarballs provided by Canonical. This will give us more flexibility with Ubuntu updates and should simplify the transition to 26.04 LTS. Initially shipping with 25.04 instead of 24.04 LTS was probably a short-sighted decision, but that’s in the past. When 26.04 LTS releases, we plan to stick with that.

For your current Sprites: once created, we don’t modify them. When 25.10 rolls out, I would create a new Sprite and copy the necessary files. I usually do this by proxying an SSH connection and using rsync. If this is impractical, the do-release-upgrade tool “works” (slowly). You will need to install ubuntu-release-upgrader-core first.

I’ve updated the docs to fix this!

There was some mixed messaging in the past, but sprite upgrade upgrades the client. sprite v0.0.1-rc40 will include slightly tweaked wording to make this less confusing.

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Interesting! Helpful! Thank you for the update! I’m looking forward to the update. Please let us know here when it comes and don’t let this topic expire.

In the meantime, and for the lifetime of existing sprites, for those who don’t realize they need to upgrade, how do people learn about and deal with security vulnerabilities in 25.04?

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The update hit the pools this weekend! I just creating a new Sprite and it’s running 25.10. We’ll have to think about how to best notify people. The contents of Sprites are self-managed, but displaying a warning is a good idea. Ubuntu’s SSH MOTD, which we remove from the stripped down images, is pretty close to what I’d want. Of course, there’s no way to add that to existing Sprites, but it may be possible to inject something similar at the API layer?

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