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Re: "Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?"



On 08.06.2017 20:52, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
> Some versions of Ubuntu (at least trusty, xenial) have the added
> "feature" to keep older kernel versions when installing new ones.  It
> kind of makes sense to keep at least the previous one (in case of a
> regression), but keeping every new patch-version is too much.

From running Ubuntu in production: It's very helpful if you can rollback
an update (be it security or general) you have just received at the boot
screen. In stable Debian almost never bumps the ABI version and hence
you don't have that option. At the same time Debian's ABI guarantees are
weaker: I had to reboot many times to insert an on-disk in-tree kernel
module into the running kernel just because the on-disk version was
updated. So I think Ubuntu does this better[*].

Ubuntu has a way of pruning old kernel versions at least with Xenial and
up (VersionedKernelPackages in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove). For
Trusty (and Precise and Lucid) we wrote our own tooling to deal with
this issue.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

[*] Ubuntu doesn't bump the ABI on *every* new version, just the ones
changing the ABI. In reality this is still very frequently and hence you
achieve a rollback mechanism through it.

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