This bug was flagged as a duplicate of 1203534, but now apparently is no longer a duplicate.
As posts in the sometime duplicate suggested the problem occurred in front end of do-release-upgrade command with the NVIDIA driver, and could be avoided by using non proprietary driver, I tried switching from NVIDIA driver to nouveau driver.
As I posted on the erstwhile duplicate bug, the upgrade ran successfully from update-manager GUI.
This bug was flagged as a duplicate of 1203534, but now apparently is no longer a duplicate.
As posts in the sometime duplicate suggested the problem occurred in front end of do-release-upgrade command with the NVIDIA driver, and could be avoided by using non proprietary driver, I tried switching from NVIDIA driver to nouveau driver.
As I posted on the erstwhile duplicate bug, the upgrade ran successfully from update-manager GUI.