Arch Linux

Grigorios

Member

Registered: 2021-01-10

Posts: 27

Arch Linux Server Kernel Upgrades

Hello,

I find myself in the situation that a administrator before my time, installed Arch Linux on one of our servers. I am planning to keep it that way and use the server as virtualization host with qemu/kvm.
One thing I noticed during my time messing with libvirt is, that when I upgraded the kernel and did not reboot the server, the default network which comes with libvirt cannot start. This raises the question how do you guys handle kernel upgrades, so that there is a minimal downtime, if possible no down time? The current solution suggested by the administrator before me, is to just ignore all kernel upgrades until the next even release number is reached. E.g: Upgrade when 5.18 is released and then again when 5.20 is released. If that method is considered good, then my follow up question would be, on what development number shall I keep the 5.18 kernel? And is it okay to ignore the kernel upgrades via pacman.conf, or does this encourage "partial upgrades"

Thank you for your time and tips

Kind regards

Grigorios

cmm11

Member

Registered: 2018-02-18

Posts: 51

Re: Arch Linux Server Kernel Upgrades

I use LTS kernel for physical & virtual servers, less chance of something breaking.
In regards to when do i update, i just check issues with arch-audit -u and just wait for anything serious.
Once there's one or more, i make a log of packages that are going to be upgraded with: checkupdates >> log.txt
copy that to my local machine. Do the usual pacman -Syu then reboot.
Can't comment on using Arch as a virtualization host, but if it was a server that isn't one of my "pets"
then i would go with something more stable like Debian / AlmaLinux.

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frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,487

Re: Arch Linux Server Kernel Upgrades

every distro has its quirks and pacman removing the current running kernel's modules thus causing stuff to break until reboot, is one of archlinux quirks - switching to the -lts kernel does not help as that also gets updated often enough (using -lts on servers may still be a good idea for other reasons)

see https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 for possible workarounds

Last edited by frostschutz (2022-06-21 16:14:43)