Upgrading to newer kernels

[Clark Smith]

Slackware 14.2 seems to be stuck in 4.4.* kernels. I wonder if
anybody in this forum has tried to upgrade to more recent kernels (say,
4.16.*) and, if so, share their experiences. Does the system remain
stable?

[Jerry Peters]

Post by Clark Smith
Slackware 14.2 seems to be stuck in 4.4.* kernels. I wonder if
anybody in this forum has tried to upgrade to more recent kernels (say,
4.16.*) and, if so, share their experiences. Does the system remain
stable?

I currently have 2 14.1 systems & 1 14.2 system, all of them are
running on 4.16.2 ATM. The 2 14.1 machines will be changing to 4.16.6
today & tomorrow. The 14.2 machine will probably wait until 4.16.7.

The only problem I've has so far is on this AA1 netbook wicd no longer
sees an wifi networks, but networkmanager does. Seems to be something
to do with ath5k since wicd wifi still works on another machine with
an intel wireless chip.

If you don't want to upgrade to 4.16, the 4.14 series is LTS.

[Jim Diamond]

Post by Clark Smith
Slackware 14.2 seems to be stuck in 4.4.* kernels. I wonder if
anybody in this forum has tried to upgrade to more recent kernels (say,
4.16.*) and, if so, share their experiences. Does the system remain
stable?

I'm running 4.10.8 on one Slackware64 14.2 machine, 4.14.14 on
another, and 4.15.15 on yet another.

I've run a bunch of other versions of kernels on these machines. I've
never had a problem with stability (maybe I've been lucky, but...).

I don't recall any problem that wasn't my fault (i.e., not including a
required driver in the config).

I haven't tried any 4.16 kernel yet, so I can't speak about those.

Keep in mind that as long as you don't do something foolish like
deleting your current kernel, if you have any issues you can just
reboot into your current kernel. (Unless you somehow manage to trash
your disk, which I think would be quite the "accomplishment".)

Jim

[Doug713705]

Le 01-05-2018, Clark Smith nous expliquait dans

Post by Clark Smith
Slackware 14.2 seems to be stuck in 4.4.* kernels. I wonder if
anybody in this forum has tried to upgrade to more recent kernels (say,
4.16.*) and, if so, share their experiences. Does the system remain
stable?

On a very recent hardware (Intel i7 Kaby Lake) I encountered endless
reboot loop with kernels version over 4.9.81.

It seems that behavior is related to spectre and meltdown patches (some
of my friends also encoutered this problem on older hardware and running
Debian).

I also encountered a bad support (even no support at all with older
kernels) for Intel HD620 (bad screen refresh on window switching,
mplayer hanging, etc) with kernel under version 4.9.81.

Facing this puzzle I decided to go with Slackware64-current which runs
4.14.29 and makes my hardware happy.

As someone else say in this thread, you can install your new kernel from
sources without removing the old one and just add a new entry to your
boot loader menu (just be cautious and don't overwrite your actual initrd if
you're using any).

[Eef Hartman]

Post by Clark Smith
anybody in this forum has tried to upgrade to more recent kernels
(say, 4.16.*) and, if so, share their experiences.

I have no experience with 4.1x kernels, but you could try to install
the 4.14.* packages from -current, although it still is being updated
very frequently (like at least once a week).
On the kernel.org site release 4.15 is already been given as EOL and
for 4.16.x you'll need a much newer C compiler then the one provided
by 14.2 (-current uses the 7.3 release).

[Ralph Spitzner]

Eef Hartman wrote:
[...]

Post by Eef Hartman
for 4.16.x you'll need a much newer C compiler then the one provided
by 14.2 (-current uses the 7.3 release).

Huh ?
Over on my Devuan, Kernel 4.16.5 compiled just fine with GCC 6.3.0....

The new gcc just has some of this sidechannel mitigation stuff in it.

-rasp

[Eef Hartman]

Post by Ralph Spitzner
Over on my Devuan, Kernel 4.16.5 compiled just fine with GCC 6.3.0....

Yeah, but 14.2 only has gcc 5.5 and even that is an update from the
original 5.3 version.

Anyway, kernel 4.17 is already at rc3 level so 4.16, which isn't a
longterm one, won't be maintained all that much longer.