Re: Upcoming changes to Debian Linux kernel packages
On 25/09/2023 00.50, Bastian Blank wrote:
Already built modules remain until someone deletes it. So you can also
switch back to the still installed older kernel version and it will have
the still working module available.
This is what I expect not to work.
Assume I have Linux 6.6 and a third-party gpu driver module installed
(so there are dkms and the Linux 6.6 headers as well) and everything is
working fine.
Then I upgrade the system, which brings Linux 6.7 (along linux-image-6.6
which is kept installed) and a new version of the gpu driver (which adds
support for 6.7). So the old gpu module for 6.6 gets removed and a new
one is built for 6.7 only (since there are only 6.7 headers now).
Unfortunately 6.7 breaks some exotic in-tree driver (which I desperately
need), so I need to go back to 6.6. Oops, there is no gpu driver module
any more. Recovery now needs manual intervention.
I'm not sure which class of bugs you are trying to solve with this
proposed unversioned linux-headers change. IMO the current scheme of
linux-headers-$version-$abi-$flavor matching
linux-image-$version-$abi-$flavor works well. But perhaps something
could be improved on the metapackage side. Ideally a user should install
either meta-linux-image-without-headers-$flavor OR
meta-linux-image-with-headers-$flavor (and ideally installing dkms
should "automatically switch" to the with-headers variant, not sure how
this could be done). The current scheme of having to install
linux-image-$flavor AND linux-headers-$flavor is a bit tricky.
I'm open to implement improvements on the dkms side.
Andreas
PS: the proposed "more versioning in the linux-image packages" will
solve some rare dkms issues where modules didn't get rebuilt after
linux-headers-* was upgraded but $(uname -r) didn't change
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