[Bug 1962225] Re: preinst check that kernel revision < 255 now does more harm than good

[windowsguy]

Same on Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS on arm64

$ sudo apt-get --fix-broken install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libc6
Suggested packages:
  glibc-doc
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libc6
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/2266 kB of archives.
After this operation, 7168 B disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 102158 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libc6_2.31-0ubuntu9.7_arm64.deb ...
ERROR: Your kernel version indicates a revision number
of 255 or greater.  Glibc has a number of built in
assumptions that this revision number is less than 255.
If you\'ve built your own kernel, please make sure that any
custom version numbers are appended to the upstream
kernel number with a dash or some other delimiter.

dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.31-0ubuntu9.7_arm64.deb (--unpack):
 new libc6:arm64 package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.31-0ubuntu9.7_arm64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

$ uname -a
Linux k2 4.9.277-82 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Feb 18 14:35:13 UTC 2022 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

$ cat /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=20.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=focal
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS"

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1962225

Title:
  preinst check that kernel revision < 255 now does more harm than good

Status in glibc package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in glibc source package in Bionic:
  Confirmed
Status in glibc source package in Focal:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  [impact]
  Amazon Linux 2 currently has a kernel with version 4.14.262-200.489.amzn2.x86_64. This causes complaints from libc6's preinst that asserts that the "revision" part of the kernel version is less than 255.

  The significance of the check is much less than it used to be when the
  major part of the kernel version was stuck at 2, so we should follow
  Debian and just drop it.

  [test case]
  Boot an Amazon Linux 2 instance. Install docker. Run an ubuntu container of the series being tested. Run "apt-get update && apt-get install --reinstall libc6" and look for error messages / failures.

  [regression potential]
  It's possible that some binaries run using the "uname26" personality will fail -- but they will already fail with the glibc as currently installed, there's no value in preventing an upgrade.

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