On 2025-02-09 09:01, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2025 at 13:22:50 +0200, Henrik Ahlgren wrote:
On Sat, 2025-02-08 at 12:05 -0500, Gary Dale wrote:
I have a few systems running Debian/Stable (Bookworm). However the kernel
version isn't always the same for some reason. After this morning's update, I
noticed that 2 of the 3 systems upgraded the kernel but to different versions.
This is shown by running uname -a.
...
Can anyone help me understand this behaviour?
Did you reboot? "uname -a" shows the running kernel, which is not
necessarily the newest installed kernel.
What you really want to do is compare the output of "uname -a" (which
shows the running kernel) with the output of "ls /boot/vmlinuz-*"
(which shows the installed kernel images). That'll tell you whether
a reboot is needed, at least in most cases.[1]
I always reboot after a kernel upgrade so uname -a should always return
the current installed kernel.
How did you attempt the actual uprade? Note that "apt upgrade" is not
enough, you need to do "apt full-upgrade" when the kernel ABI has been
increased (NN+ in linux-image-6.1.0-NN-amd64).
You're thinking of apt-get upgrade. What you said is correct concerning
apt-get, but apt upgrade *will* bring in new kernel packages by default,
so long as the metapackage is installed.
The metapackage in question is the one without an ABI version number
in it, but with the architecture in it. For me, it is named
linux-image-amd64. On other architectures, it would be linux-image-ARCH.
I would recommend that Gary check whether this is installed on the one
system that appears not to have upgraded the kernel.
[1] Sometimes, *very* rarely, a kernel security patch may be released
that doesn't change the ABI version number. In this case, ls wouldn't
show you that there's a newer kernel installed but not yet running.
You'd have to use something like "dpkg -l linux-image\* | grep ^.i"
to see the actual package version numbers, and compare that against
the *second* version number in the output of "uname -a".
All 3 systems have the linux-image-amd64 metapackage installed.
