This week sees an update to the kernel for most Ubuntu systems, there also some big changes if you run a PXE server for your site. Here are the details of all the notable changes…

Kernel

The INF kernel series for Ubuntu Focal and Jammy has been updated to 5.15.0-107.117. This is the kernel used by the vast majority of LCFG-managed systems so be aware they will all need a reboot once they receive this weekly release.

nvidia

There is new support for managing the nvidia packages on Ubuntu Focal in the same way as Jammy which uses pre-built kernel module packages to avoid the need for running dkms. This is currently not the default behaviour, to enable it you need to define the LCFG_OPTIONS_NVIDIA_TEST macro at the top of an LCFG profile. We would really appreciate those still using nvidia on Focal to test this and give feedback before we make it the standard approach.

PXE Server

The LCFG pxeserver component has been updated to improve support for the grub bootloader in the following ways:

• It is now possible to specify an admin password for the grub menu using new mode-specific password resources (e.g. pxeserver.password_grub. An encrypted password can be generated using the grub-mkpasswd-pbkdf2 utility.
• The timeout is now correctly handled for grub (grub uses seconds, syslinux is in tenths of seconds)
• The client-specific grub configuration file name is now literally the IP or MAC string and not encoded in the same way as syslinux (e.g. grub.cfg-e0:73:e7:33:45:0a instead of grub.cfg-01-e0-73-e7-33-45-0a), this makes the top-level grub configuration file simpler.
• There is also new support for falling back to a site-specific default menu and, for security, it now prevents the user dropping into the grub admin shell when everything else fails.
• The component documentation now clarifies which resources are supported by grub.

See bug#1347 for further details, thanks to Kenny MacDonald for all his work on improving this component.

Changes to headers and package lists

Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.

Weekly Changes – 27/05/2024 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0