mintupdate symlinks old kernels to vmlinuz even if active version is higher

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#983 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
linux, python
Domain
operating-systems

Research direction

Start by reproducing the hybrid HWE and GA kernel setup described in the issue and inspect how mintupdate handles vmlinuz and initrd symlinks when an older GA kernel is installed. Done means installing or updating the older kernel leaves both symlinks targeting the currently running newer kernel.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

BUG

Describe the bug
On hybrid systems with both HWE and GA kernels (as backups), mintupdate messes up the vmlinuz and initrd symlinks when updating / installing a GA kernel (older) before the HWE (newer). Requiring manual adjustment with ln -sf.

For example, having a system with both Linux 6.14 HWE and Linux 6.8 GA as backup, when mintupdate shows an update for 6.8 and is applied, the vmlinuz is symlinked to that version, and the active version is now .old. This could cause massive issues with utilities that rely on vmlinuz and initrd.

Screenshots
None

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  1. Have a hybrid system with both HWE (newer) and GA (older) kernel
  2. Update / Install new GA (older) kernel
  3. vmlinuz and initrd are now symlinked to the older kernel.

Expected behavior
A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

Symlinks should stay as-is if the target kernel update version is lower than the running one.

Distribution:

  • [ x ] Linux Mint
  • LMDE
  • Other (please specify)

Software version:
7.1.1

Logs:
Not needed.

Crash report:
None.

Additional context
None.

Locale:
If the problem is with text not getting displayed correctly, paste the output of the terminal command locale.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
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Forks
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