Weekly Changes – 06/09/2021

A fairly quiet week with the few changes having little impact on most systems. Here are the details…

Kernel boot configuration

The LCFG kernel component will now request a reboot if the kernel symlinks (vmlinuz or initrd.img) are changed. This follows on from the changes to the LCFG kernel component last week to improve the management of the kernel symlinks.

Note that a reboot will only be automatically triggered if the autoreboot component is active and kernel is in the autoreboot.components resource list.

Kernel

The Ubuntu Focal INF_TEST has been updated to 5.4.0-81.91

dkms on Ubuntu

A bug was discovered in the dkms (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) tool whilst building openafs kernel module packages for Ubuntu. Depending on how a user becomes root prior to running a command it can become confused and refuse to run. This is a known issue – bug#956245 – which is fixed in newer versions of dkms. The suggested patch has been applied and the package version override will be automatically applied for all sites.

mock package builder

We regularly have problems with the mock package building tool which are related to corruption of the yum cache. To help avoid this problem a new purgecache method has been added which can be used to completely remove the cache directory contents (see the value of the mock.cache_topdir resource).

On the DICE SL7 pkgforge builder this new method is now used to clear the cache on a nightly basis which should hopefully bring an end to the regular build failures we have been experiencing.