On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 12:46:13PM -0500, John Vestrum wrote:
> On 08/10/11 12:36, Mark Panen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I noticed my kernel has been upgraded two or three times but i am still
> > sitting on the original:
> >
> > "uname -r
> > 2.6.32-5-amd64"
> >
>
> Sorry for the belated reply, but having recently switched from another distro this bothered me as well. The typical advice to use dpkg/apt-query/aptitude only tells half the story - those tools only know which kernel is installed, not what is running. I finally found what I was looking for in /proc/version.
>
> $ cat /proc/version
> Linux version 2.6.32-5-amd64 (Debian 2.6.32-38) (ben@decadent.org.uk) (gcc version 4.3.5 (Debian 4.3.5-4) ) #1 SMP Mon Oct 3 03:59:20 UTC 2011
>
>
> Based on that I wrote a shell script to tell me if a machine needs a reboot, the heart of which is:
>
> RUNNINGKERNEL=`awk '{print $5}' /proc/version | tr -d ')'`
> INSTALLEDKERNEL=`dpkg-query --show --showformat='${Version}\n' linux-base`
> if [ "$INSTALLEDKERNEL" != "$RUNNINGKERNEL" ]; then
> echo "Running kernel (version $RUNNINGKERNEL) not the same as latest installed kernel (version $INSTALLEDKERNEL)."
> fi
>
> At least this works on amd64 Squeeze.
I'm not sure when the functionality was added (disclaimer: I run Sid,
but have had this for quite a while now), but there is now a
distribution-lead way of telling the user when a reboot is required.
When a package such as linux-base is updated, the postinstall script
touches /var/run/reboot-required and appends its name (i.e.
'linux-base') to /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs.
So, if you have a package such as update-notifier (or even Byobu if you
work headless), these will watch for the presense of
/var/run/reboot-required and let you know that you should reboot soon.
You might want to see if /var/run/reboot-required exists on your system
as this should be a more robust measure of whether you need to reboot
than simply an out of date kernel (For example, I see that DBus also
wants me to reboot).
--
Darac Marjal
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