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Comment by bsagdiyev | Hacker News Reader

Heads up, in-place upgrade from 10 to 11 caused a kernel panic on boot with the new 5.10 kernel. Having it boot with the old kernel seems to work but isn’t ideal. Haven’t done much troubleshooting so I can’t give much more to pinpoint but welcome any input on what to do/look for. My first time doing a Debian upgrade and it’s not a great experience compared to CentOS

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Same. My (<1 month old, very fresh/clean) Debian 10 install used a non-standard MBR on GPT boot that instead of a distinct boot partition instead used arbitrarily located bootlists for locating partitions. After upgrading to 11 (bullseye) a few months ago I could no longer boot beyond grub2... unless I picked the old 4.19 kernel from 10.

After a lot of testing old snapshot kernels and bit of git bisect and compiling I figured out the support for this non-standard boot was removed sometime around kernel 5.6.0. As of right now I'm still stuck on 4.19.

So... if you're doing MBR boot still on modern GPT disks, be careful upgrading your linux (any flavor).

> My first time doing a Debian upgrade and it’s not a great experience compared to CentOS

My understanding was that CentOS does not even support upgrades between major versions, is that not true?

FWIW: I successfully upgraded 3 machines of mine yesterday. 2 Hetzner Cloud VMs, 1 dedicated server at Hetzner. I've never had any major issues during Debian upgrades since I've been doing them ~10 years ago. One time I hit a kernel bug [1] with my configuration, but that would also have happened without the upgrade.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931574

I've never seen a major version upgrade on Debian go flawlessly -- reinstall is typically indicated. That being said, that you got it to boot at all after a boofed upgrade is really great work!

Historically, the upgrade process with Debian has been rough. RH & derivates always seem more resilient to the upgrade blues, to me. It's gotten a lot better, though.

Yeah — I was expecting something to break with the way the steps seemed to go, not sure why, just had that feeling. That said it is nice everything else seems to work so far but I am planning on most likely just backing up /home and rebuilding on Debian 11 or one of the new CentOS replacements.

With virtually any major OS upgrade there's rarely a reason to immediately upgrade and be an early-adopter. When stability is paramount it's highly recommend for most machines to wait a few weeks (or even months) and then upgrade.

This advice applies to Windows, macOS and Linux.

If it isn't obvious from the panic or from dmesg streamed over ssh, it sound like you will have to try a git bisect.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel/GitBisect

The panic scrolls on the screen I hook up, but I was reading I could rebuild it with kdump if I want to get that deep in to it and try to figure out more that way. I will take a look at that wiki article though and see if it helps out any.

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