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Upgrading the Kernel (sid, woody)

• Q. What steps are necessary to upgrade a Woody system from Linux 2.2.x kernel to a 2.4.x?
  • A.
    • 1. Run the command "apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.x[ -y ]", where x is the latest minor release number (currently 18) and -y is optionally defined optimized version (e.g. -686, for the latest Intel/AMD processors).
    • 2. Update your boot manager. The kernel-image packages offer to update ["LILO"] for you. If you are running multi-boot or using another boot loader like ["Grub"] you may want to do this outside of the install process.

Boot manager issues

In case of ["LILO"] boot manager:

In case of ["Grub"] boot manager:

• Q. I just upgraded to the 2.4 kernel from a 2.2 or 2.0 series kernel, and I get an kernel panic error saying /root= missing, halfway into the boot. My old kernel still works without any problems though. What's going on?
  • A. The Debian 2.4 series kernels use an initial RAM disk (initrd) to load part of the kernel at boot time ... This is an error that could show up if you've used dist-upgrade to migrate from a previous Debian release (i.e. Potato).
    • ["LILO"] Add the appropriate initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4 to your lilo.conf and rerun lilo.

    • ["Grub"] Modify the /boot/grub/menu.lst to include the proper initrd= setting. You do not need to re-run isntall-grub

• Q. I am trying to use devfs with devfsd and grub-install is complaining.

  • A. If you have old /dev/hd? entries in your /boot/grub/devices.map grub-install will complain. The solution is to delete the devices.map and rerun grub-install

*devfsd is a small daemon that sets up all of the old /dev entries for compatibility with older programs.

Troubleshooting/Debugging

2.6.23

2.6.23 includes the new, better, fairer CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, make SLUB the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes. more on [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_23]-~.

2.6.22

2.6.22 includes an optional, more SMP-friendly SLUB allocator ), new and much better wireless and firewire stacks, a new architecture called Blackfin, a LVM-for-flash-storage-devices called UBI, event notifications through file descriptors , the POSIX-draft utimensat() syscall, the 'TCP Illinois' and 'YeAH-TCP' congestion control algorithms, IPV6 Optimistic Duplicate Address Detection, AF_RXRPC socket support, relocatable x86-64 kernel support, improvements to the CFQ I/O scheduler, more process footprint information in /proc, various new drivers and many other improvements. ~-more on [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_22]-~.

2.6.21

2.6.21 improves the virtualization features merged in 2.6.20 with VMI, a paravirtualization interface that will be used by Vmware (and maybe -probably not- Xen) software. KVM does get initial paravirtualization along with live migration and host suspend/resume support. 2.6.21 also gets a tickless idle loop mechanism called "Dynticks" , a feature built in top of "clockevents" which unifies the timer handling and brings true high-resolution timers. Other features are: bigger kernel command-line, optional ZONE_DMA; support for the PA SEMI PWRficient CPU, for a Cell-based "celleb" architecture from Toshiba, better PS3 support: support for NFS IPv6, IPv4 <-> IPv6 IPSEC tunneling support, UFS2 write support, kprobes for PPC32, kexec and oprofile for ARM, public key encryption for ecryptfs, Fcrypt and Camilla cipher algorithms, NAT port randomization, audit lockdown mode, many new drivers and many other small improvements.~-more on [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_21]-~.

2.6.20

With 2.6.20, Linux joins the virtualization trend. This release adds two virtualization implementations: A full-virtualization implementation that uses Intel/AMD hardware virtualization capabilities called KVM and a paravirtualization implementation that can be used by different hypervisors (Rusty's lguest; Xen and VMWare in the future, etc). This release also adds initial Sony Playstation 3 support, a fault injection debugging feature , UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, support for using swap files for suspend users, relocatable x86 kernel support for kdump users, small microoptimizations in x86 (sleazy FPU, regparm, support for the Processor Data Area, optimizations for the Core 2 platform), a generic HID layer, DEEPNAP power savings for PPC970, lockless radix-tree readside, shared pagetables for hugetbl, ARM support for the AT91 and iop13xx processors, full NAT for nf_conntrack and many other things.~-more on [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_20]-~.

2.6.19

Linux 2.6.19 includes the clustering GFS2 filesystem ; Ecryptfs the first experimental version of EXT4 (aimed at developers), support for the Atmel AVR32 architecture, sleepable RCU, improvements for NUMA-based systems, a "-o flush" mount option aimed at FAT-based hotpluggable media devices (mp3), physical CPU hotplug and memory hot-add in x86-64, support for compiling x86 kernels with the GCC stack protection, vectored async I/O , Netlabel subsystem, allow to disable compilation of the block layer, IDE Parallel-ATA drivers based in libata, Granular IPSec associations for use in MLS environments, add the Netlabel subsystem, Mobile IPv6 (RFC 3775), some new drivers, improved support for many already existing drivers, and many other things.~-more on [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_19]-~.

2.6.18 (Debian Etch's version), and Previous versions

see [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux26Changes]

See also:

• HowToUpgradeKernel