[Aptitude-devel] Bug#619575: aptitude not upgrading kernel correctly

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo


Hi Nicolas,

2011-03-25 09:59 Nicolas:
>Package: aptitude
>Version: 0.6.3-3.2
>Severity: important
>
>Hello.
>
>I was using linux-image-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem and linux-headers-2.6.32-5-common,
>with nvidia and virtualbox kernel modules, and also linux-image-2.6.32-5-686
>installed.
>
>While aptitude upgraded linux-image-2.6.32-5-686 to linux-image-2.6.38-1-686,
>it:
>
>1) didn't upgrade linux-image-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem to linux-
>image-2.6.38-1-686-bigmem, meaning my system couldn't use all available
>physical memory (grub would select the latest kernel, so the one without bigmem
>support)
>
>2) didn't install linux-headers-2.6.38-1-common thus dkms failed to install the
>kernel modules, resulting after reboot with X not starting - installing
>manually this package made dkms correctly build the modules

Sorry that this bug was not handled earlier.

In the case that this keeps happening to you, there are meta-packages
with more generic names that do not change from version to version and
so are useful in these cases, for example:

  linux-image-2.6-686-bigmem
  linux-headers-686-pae

If you have these installed, when upgrading they will depend on the more
up to date version of that branch of the kernel, e.g.
linux-image-2.6.38-1-686-bigmem at the time, so it is likely to solve
this kind of problems in the future.

It doesn't look like aptitude is at fault here, specially with kernel
packages which serve special purposes (aptitude has no idea if the
machine benefits from -bigmem kernels or not, for example), and kernel
packages in general are very special compared with normal packages.

If you already had those mata-packages installed and aptitude did not
upgrade them anyway, and if you still recall those details, can you
provide more information about how this happened, like how exactly did
you upgrade (pressing + in the interactive menu, with "aptitude upgrade"
in the command line, if it complained about some conflict...)?


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>