Re: linux-headers installation by default on debian cloud images
Hi Amy,
On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 11:22:12AM -0700, Amy Crate wrote:
> We have some teams in GCP that would like to make use of the
> linux-headers-cloud-amd64 package. Sometimes they are using an image for
> longer than the default kernel on that image has a linux-headers package in
> the repositories, but would still like to be able to use the image without
> a kernel upgrade & reboot. For this reason we'd like to include
> linux-headers-cloud-amd64 in our images by default. Any thoughts on this?
> Is there a reason not to include this? Can this be incorporated upstream?
IMO the correct way forward for such users is to upgrade even if that
means reboting. I think I'm opposed to this change for a few reasons.
>From a policy point of view: our images follow the requirements at [1].
Including kernel headers would be a significant deviation from the
default Debian experience. I don't think the justification above is
sufficient to override this concern.
>From a practical point of view: it'd increase the size of the images for
one idiosyncratic use case. Note that the linux-headers-amd64
transitive dependencies include kbuild, gcc, binutils, and a significant
number of shared libraries.
That also increases the mirror traffic for updates and the security
surface area that people's scanners will complain about.
Ross
[1] - https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages
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