Confirming publicly that there has been an exception made for future gke and gkeop (Anthos on VMware) kernel header and module packages due to the GKE deployments being long-lived and often having older kernels installed.
This issue with GKE specifically was reported publicly @ https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2023-May/139318.html Phil On Fri, 12 May 2023 at 13:20, Juerg Haefliger <juerg.haefli...@canonical.com> wrote: > On Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:05:39 +0200 > Steve Langasek <steve.langa...@ubuntu.com> wrote: > > > Hi folks, > > > > Kernel updates have an interesting property that, unlike most SRUs, the > > binary package names change for each update, because the ABI is presumed > to > > change each time. > > > > The result of this is that each kernel update causes the binary packages > > from the previous version to become "NBS" (not built from source). > > > > Cleanup of NBS packages from the archive is a manual process involving > > Archive Admins; they are not automatically removed from the archive. And > > historically, we did not want to remove NBS kernel packages during a > release > > cycle, because our netboot images relied on modules of matching ABI being > > available in the archive corresponding to the kernel ABI used in the > netboot > > image - and as we did not control when our users deployed netboot images > on > > their infrastructure, we did not want to arbitrarily break working > customer > > systems, we did not remove NBS kernel packages as we went - only at EOL > of a > > release. > > > > However, netboot images that rely on kernel packages of a matching ABI > being > > available in the archive are an artifact of debian-installer, and as of > > jammy, we no longer ship debian-installer. Therefore, this rationale for > > retaining the old kernel binary packages in the archive no longer exists. > > > > Nearly 50% of all binary packages published in the jammy-updates pocket > > today are from kernels[1], and this proportion only increases as an LTS > > ages. I have not done the analysis, but I expect the kernel packages to > > represent a similar or higher proportion of the *size* of the -updates > > pocket. Thus, keeping these old binary packages around impacts both the > > speed of `apt update` for both -updates and -security pockets, and the > size > > of the mirror set for these releases. > > > > I am therefore intending that, for jammy and later releases, we start to > > prune NBS kernel packages on an ongoing basis, not just at EOL time. > > > > We already have users complaining on IRC about missing kernel packages... > What is the official way/process for getting older packages for example for > crash dump analysis where one might need an older kernel+dbgsym from an > active series? > > ...Juerg > -- > ubuntu-devel mailing list > ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel > -- Phil Roche Staff Software Engineer Canonical Public Cloud
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