Re: Feedback on problems with Core Update 168 Testing

[Rob Brewer <ipfire-devel@grantura.co.uk>]

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On Thursday 12 May 2022 10:13 Michael Tremer wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Thanks for spending so much time on this. We definitely need to improve
> the general update experience since we sometimes seem to break people’s
> systems and it is not nice to re-install a firewall from scratch. It will
> take a while.
> 
> So what I can say is that the kernel module issues come from when the
> running kernel is changed and the kernel is trying to load any modules
> that now have changed. This fails by design, because we sign our kernel
> modules. The key is randomly generated at build time and used to sign all
> modules and it then thrown away. For each build, we are using a different,
> unique key that is not preserved.
> 
> This means that although the kernel modules are of the same version, they
> cannot be loaded because the signature check fails. That might also
> explain why you are seeing so many ipset errors, because the kernel cannot
> load that module any more. However, we use so much ipset now, why isn’t
> the module loaded from before the update was started?
> 
> The same goes for any network drivers. I assume you are using virtio or a
> generic e1000 network adapter which will have been initialised at boot
> time. The kernel should never unload the kernel module for that interface
> and load it again later. I have no idea what could have triggered that.
> 
> No matter what though; after you reboot, the new kernel should be booted
> being able to load all modules it wants and the system should run
> absolutely fine. Can you confirm that that is at least the case?
> 



My Pakfire upgrade to 168 on my development APU2 board failed during upgrade 
and I lost ethernet communication with the PC.

The APU2 now fails after the grub prompt with the error: 

*IPFire 2.27 (x86_64) - core166 Development Build: master/8f696f60 GNU/Linu

Loading Linux 5.15.23-ipfire ...
error: file `/vmlinuz-5.15.23-ipfire' not found.
Loading initial ramdisk ...
error: you need to load the kernel first.

so it looks like update-initramfs didn't run after the upgrade.

I'll try to boot the box from a usbstick and see if I can access the disk.

Rob