Friday 12 May 2023

Re: NBS removals of old kernels from stable -security and -updates pockets

Hello,
Le 12/05/2023 à 17:24, Dimitri John Ledkov a écrit :
> On Fri, 12 May 2023 at 16:19, Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, May 12, 2023 at 02:20:39PM +0200, Juerg Haefliger wrote:
>>>> I am therefore intending that, for jammy and later releases, we start to
>>>> prune NBS kernel packages on an ongoing basis, not just at EOL time.
>>
>>> We already have users complaining on IRC about missing kernel packages...
>>
>> What, specifically, are the complaints?
>>
>>> What is the official way/process for getting older packages for example for
>>> crash dump analysis where one might need an older kernel+dbgsym from an
>>> active series?
>>
>> Does the Ubuntu Kernel Team accept crash reports on out-of-date kernels?
>
> Yes, often. Especially when a given ABI is "popular" (aka default
> quick launch in clouds, point release download media, certified, and
> similar).
> Also Canonical Support & Livepatch mostly work with out-of-date reports too.
> As generally the desire is for the kernel they are going to reboot
> into, fix a specific problem, rather than rebooting to the newest one
> to still discover that the issue at hand is not fixed.
>

Being one of the customers that brought up the issue on IRC, maybe I can
comment a bit more.

First of all, this situation breaks the possibility of installing an
older kernel, or to systematically install the same kernel version on
multiple platforms (aka pinning a kernel version), etc.

While this is not the place to discuss the usefulness of kernel version
pinning, this was the case on thousands of our servers and it is no
longer the possible. And using Launchpad's publishihnghistory' endpoint
is not the simplest task to automate when the previous "apt-get -y
install linux-image-generic-{version}" was trivial. For instance in
order to d/l from launchpad we need to know the complete version number
with the added -{number}{number} suffix of the .deb package which is not
the case with "apt-get".

I have yet to investigate the case but it also makes it difficult, when
using HWE meta-packages to restrict installation of kernels to a
specific major version (i.e. keep installing 5.19.x when newer HWE
kernels with major versions are available)


>> The general policy for apport is to disallow bug report submissions if the
>> executable or any of the loaded libraries are from out-of-date packages.
>>
>> But it will still be possible to download these older packages from
>> Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+publishinghistory
>
> As mentioned elsewhere pull-pkg (and friends pull-lp-debs /
> pull-lp-ddebs ) are very useful tools to quickly & securely download
> desired packages from launchpad librarian.
>

You will have guessed that Canonical support is not the only one to
perform crash dump analysis. H/W specific issues never make it to the
distro and many people are not versed in developer's specific toolset.
So the possibility to rely on the distribution standard mechanisms,
especially when those have been possible for years is easier for the
majority.

All that to say that, while the presence of those packages was
historically motivated by their necessity for netboot, it has become
expected and relied upon in many workflows.

Kind regards,

...Louis (aka caribou)

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