Debian buster backports linux kernel

Jensd’s I/O buffer

random technotes…

Install a newer kernel in Debian 10 (buster) stable

When using the latest version of Debian 10 stable, also known as buster, even with all updates installed, by default, you can’t get the most recent kernel via the standard repositories in your package manager. While the idea of using Debian stable is to remain stable and rather conservative, there are several benefits with installing a newer kernel and in some cases it’s the only option to get the OS to support all your hardware. The risk and impact on stability is small and the process is rather simple.

Youtube Video

If you are interested, I also created a YouTube video from this blogpost. If you prefer classic text, you can just follow the rest of this article.

Introduction

Some of the benefits of upgrading your kernel are:

• Support for previously unsupported hardware: every kernel release has a list of added drivers. Especially when you have recent hardware, a newer kernel could be required to fully support your video card for example.
• Performance improvements and bug fixes: newer kernels often contain a lot of bug fixes, have new functions and performance tweaks. Here again, the most is to gain on newer hardware.
• New kernel options and security fixes

The most recent (stable) kernel that is available at the moment of writing is version 5.9, released October 11 – 2020. You can find a complete overview of changes in every kernel version at https://www.kernel.org/ or http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxVersions

The latest version of the kernel available, at the time of writing, via the standard repositories for Debian 10 is/was 4.19. This one was release about 2 years ago on October 22 – 1018.

There are basically two options to install a newer kernel in Debian stretch. The first is the easiest and this is what I will explain in this post. The second is not so easy. It is simply to compile a newer kernel yourself. While compiling a kernel nowadays isn’t rocket science anymore, the first way is still preferable and will save you a lot of time because others have been through the second method and present you the result of their work 🙂

Installing a newer kernel in Debian Buster

The easiest way to install a newer kernel in Debian, is to install it from the backports. Backports are packages taken from the next Debian release, adjusted and recompiled for usage on the stable release. For this post, I’m starting with a minimal install (system tools only), the only packages I added after finishing the installation were sudo and aptitude.

In order to install a kernel from the backports, we need to add the backports-repository for your Debian version to the apt-sources and update the list of available packages:

Now, you can browse the available kernels in the backports-repository by adding -t buster-backports to your apt commands. Or just search for all available:

At this point, you can either install a specific version manually or choose to go for the latest release. To install the latest release, including necessary dependencies:

After the upgrade, you can simply perform a reboot and the new kernel should be activated as the new default.

In most cases this is probably what you but if you experience issues with this new kernel, maybe due to issues with a change or difference in the kernel modules, you can easily switch back to the previous, or any installed, version with grub.

During boot, before the timeout expires, select “Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux”:

In the next screen choose the working, or desired, kernel:

Install a specific kernel version

If, for some reason, you prefer a specific kernel version, you choose a kernel from the list in the aptitude output above and install it with apt. Most of the kernel images in the backports repo have suffixes. The rt-suffix stands for realtime and is mostly interesting for embedded projects or machines that will drive industrial hardware. dbg stands for debugging. And bpo is for the standard kernel from backports.

After the installation, reboot your system and select the newly installed kernel from the selection displayed in GRUB, after selecting “Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux”:

To verify that the new kernel is used after booting:

Uninstalling unused kernels in Debian

When everything works as expected, you can safely uninstall the older kernel in order to clean up your system and to free up some space in /boot

To check which kernels are currently installed:

Uninstall the old one:

That should be all it takes in order to install a recent kernel and cleanup older kernels on a Debian system. Not so difficult as you thought probably 🙂

4 thoughts on “ Install a newer kernel in Debian 10 (buster) stable ”

Hi there, I also commented on your youtube video:

I am about to receive a brand new laptop and am hoping to run Buster on it, at least until Bullseye has been out for a couple months or so. How does this method affect security updates or future kernel versions? Also, doesn’t that command upgrade ALL packages from backport, not just the kernel to the latest versions from that repository?

As far as I understand it the backports do contain the patches/security fixes that would be part of the main kernel. There is less testing as can be seen in the backports FAQ. The command does upgrade all packages from backport. Without that you would run into issues with dependencies.

Источник

Documentation

About Backports

Debian Backports provides new packages with new features on supported Debian stable releases.

As a matter of Backports policy, packages in the stable-backports suite are taken from Debian testing; however, in rare cases such as security updates, packages are taken from unstable. Backports Policy permits this exclusively when such packages will be part of the next Debian stable release. In any case, the new packages are recompiled for use on Debian stable. Backports are expected to make use of the versions of libraries available in Debian stable whenever possible; however, when required, the backporting of additional dependencies is permitted.

When a new Debian release is made, the previous stable suite becomes old-stable. While old stable releases may have Long Term Support, old-stable-backports are only made available for a period of one year after a new Debian stable release has been made. For example, Debian Buster was released 6 July 2019 and stretch-backports was retired one year later. Packages in old-stable-backports must track the versions in stable (or stable/updates for security fixes).

Backports cannot be tested as extensively as Debian stable, and are thus supported on a best-effort basis; there is a risk of incompatibilities with other components in Debian stable, so backports should be used with care! That said, Debian Backports Policy does not allow backports of libraries that would break all dependent packages in stable (eg: new Qt 5.x releases), and by virtue of this, Debian Backports are considered generally safe when used as intended on an individual package basis.

The coinstallability of all available backports is not tested, and it is strongly recommended to opt-into the use of specific backported packages on an as-needed basis.

Add Backports to sources.list

to sources.list (or add a new file with the «.list» extension to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/).

Run apt update or apt-get update

Installing a Package from Backports

All backports are deactivated by default so that the normal operation of a stable installation will not be compromised with potentially disruptive changes (such as incompatible configuration schema). Release files make this possible, and all backported packages are pinned to priority 100 via ButAutomaticUpgrades: yes . To install something from backports run one of:

and of course aptitude may also be used:

The Old-stable-sloppy Suite

To guarantee a clean upgrade path from one Debian stable release to the next, packages in Backports cannot be newer than the packages destined for the next Debian stable release; this is a matter of Backports Policy. Anyone who is willing to sacrifice the ability to cleanly and smoothly upgrade between stable releases may «get the latest version available» via old-stable-sloppy. Old-stable-sloppy backports are packages from testing that have been rebuilt for old-stable.

Enabling old-stable-sloppy-backports is near identical to stable-backports, with two notable exceptions. First, in sources.list. Rather than using:

use this instead:

Second, Packages in backports-sloppy are provided «as-is» and have no official support. Like old-stable-backports, old-stable-backports-sloppy is taken offline one year after a new Debian release has been made.

Subscribe to the Security Announcements Mailing List (highly recommended)

To receive announcements about security updates for Debian Backports, subscribe to the debian-backports-announce mailing list.

Report Bugs

Please report bugs in backported packages to the backports mailing list and NOT to the Debian BTS!

Источник

How to upgrade the Debian 10 kernel from backports without recompiling it from scratch

I’m running Debian 10 on an i9-9900k on a Gigabyte Aorus Pro motherboard (using the integrated Intel graphics chipset) and an nVIDIA RTX 2080Ti graphics card. I have two monitors. I want to have monitor B working with the nVIDIA card and monitor A with the Intel integrated chipset. The problem is that only monitor B is working now. Monitor A is turned off. Maybe there is something bad with the secondary graphic card, because Debian disables the card that’s not the most important. I want to enable it. Someone told me that the kernel that I’m using (4.19) is old and it does not support the Intel chipset of the motherboard. I would like to update it, but I don’t know how to do that. He said also that it is in the backports. So a couple of lines should be enough. I tried to compile a new kernel from scratch, version 5.3.2, using the default settings, but it didn’t work, in fact it freezes during boot. So, my question is: how can I easily upgrade the Debian 10 kernel, from 4.19 at least to a version that allows me to enable the Intel chipset and also firmware-misc-nonfree ?

1 Answer 1

Adapting my Debian 9 answer to Debian 10:

install the backported kernel:

(the new kernel will be installed alongside your current kernel, so you can always boot the latter if things go wrong)

install the firmware:

As of this writing, this will install version 5.7.10 of the kernel, with the firmware from August 2020.

Источник

Documentation

Introduction

You are running Debian stable, because you prefer the Debian stable tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. This is where backports come in.

Backports are packages taken from the next Debian release (called «testing»), adjusted and recompiled for usage on Debian stable. Because the package is also present in the next Debian release, you can easily upgrade your stable+backports system once the next Debian release comes out. (In a few cases, usually for security updates, backports are also created from the Debian unstable distribution.)

Backports cannot be tested as extensively as Debian stable, and backports are provided on an as-is basis, with risk of incompatibilities with other components in Debian stable. Use with care!

It is therefore recommended to only select single backported packages that fit your needs, and not use all available backports.

Where to start

• Users should start at the Instructions page.
• Contributors should start Contribute page.
• If you want to know which packages are available via backports.debian.org look at the Packages page.

bullseye-backports and buster-backports-sloppy started

From now on you can upload packages to those two distributions. Please ensure to follow the rules of those distributions (yes, that means you can’t upload packages to bullseye-backports now that are not in testing ;))

stretch-backports discontinued

Following the rules oldstable backports was discontinued some time ago, but we never announced that offically. Please do not upload anything to oldstable backports.

security uploads

Announcing security updates didn’t worked well in the past. We therefore decided to change the mechanism security announcements work. Every Debian contributor (DM/DD) can now send a signed mail to the debian-backports-announce mailinglist. Please follow the template when doing so. The contribution document also shows how to reserve a BSA by doing a merge request to the website.

new backports maintainers

I am happy to announce that Thorsten Glaser (tg) and Micha Lenk (micha) will join us a backports ftpmasters. They are not yet onboarded, but that will happen soon. Please give them a warm welcome.

updates for the website

If you have something to contribute for our webseite, feel free to create an issue or (even better) create a merge request against https://salsa.debian.org/backports-team/backports-website

Alex — backports ftpmaster

[1] https://backports.debian.org/Contribute/ [2] https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/ [3] https://backports.debian.org/Contribute/#index4h2

Now that buster was released we are pleased to announce the availability of buster-backports and stretch-backports-sloppy.

What to upload where

As a reminder, uploads to a release-backports pocket are to be taken from release + 1, uploads to a release-backports-sloppy pocket are to be taken from release + 2. Which means:

Source Distribution	Backports Distribution	Sloppy Distribution
buster	stretch-backports	—
bullseye	buster-backports	stretch-backports-sloppy

Backports and LTS

Please keep in mind that backports doesn’t follow LTS. Which means that we will drop support for oldstable (stretch) around one year after the release of buster. Thats in sync with the — official — security support for oldstable

BSA Security Advisories

We plan to switch the security-announce mailinglist to keyring based authentication, which means that every DD and DM is able to publish its own BSA advisories. We will send out a seperate announcement after the switch happened — and of course update the documentation

Statistics

For packages backported from buster, so far we have 1624 different source packages in stretch-backports. Those 1624 source packages took 2821 uploads from 252 uploaders to become reality.

Thanks

Thanks have to go out to all people making backports possible, and that includes up front the backporters themself who do upload the packages, track and update them on a regular basis, but also the buildd team making the autobuilding possible and the ftp masters for creating the suites in the first place.

Alex and Rhonda — backports.debian.org ftpmasters

With the release of stretch we are pleased to open the doors for stretch-backports and jessie-backports-sloppy. \o/

As usual with a new release we will change a few things for the backports service.

What to upload where

As a reminder, uploads to a release-backports pocket are to be taken from release + 1, uploads to a release-backports-sloppy pocket are to be taken from release + 2. Which means:

Source Distribution	Backports Distribution	Sloppy Distribution
buster	stretch-backports	jessie-backports-sloppy
stretch	jessie-backports	—

Deprecation of LTS support for backports

We started supporting backports as long as there is LTS support as an experiment. Unfortunately it didn’t worked, most maintainers didn’t wanted to support oldoldstable-backports (squeeze) for the lifetime of LTS. So things started to rot in squeeze and most packages didn’t received updates. After long discussions we decided to deprecate LTS support for backports. From now on squeeze-backports(-sloppy) is closed and will not receive any updates. Expect it to get removed from the mirrors and moved to archive in the near future.

BSA handling

We — the backports team — didn’t scale well in processing BSA requests. To get things better in the future we decided to change the process a little bit. If you upload a package which fixes security problems please fill out the BSA template and create a ticket in the rt tracker (see https://backports.debian.org/Contribute/#index3h2 for details).

Stretching the rules

From time to time its necessary to not follow the backports rules, like a package needs to be in testing or a version needs to be in Debian. If you think you have one of those cases, please talk to us on the list before upload the package.

Thanks

Thanks have to go out to all people making backports possible, and that includes up front the backporters themself who do upload the packages, track and update them on a regular basis, but also the buildd team making the autobuilding possible and the ftp masters for creating the suites in the first place.

We wish you a happy stretch Alex, on behalf of the Backports Team

Источник