I performed the actual upgrade yesterday! The upgrade was fairly painless, however I had several program fail to dynamically link against upgraded binaries. PowerDNS Recursor failed to link on startup against Boost since the base library was upgraded. I had an internal service also fail because of ImageMagick being upgraded. I’ll have to find a hook to reinstall the Ruby Gem next time so it doesn’t fail. I had to get DNS up yesterday or incurr the wrath of those who live in my house. The Recursor, despite claiming otherwise, failed to build without a version of Protobufs which was easy enough to install through the package manager. I used the oppertunity to build a newer version with security patches.

After a small tweak that only leaves the service. I was going to punt until later today and desired to finish reading through the change logs.

Kernel Changes

There wasn’t much more in the 4.9 release of the kernel.

In kernel 4.10 the new virtualzation support for vGPUs sounds really cool! I wonder if the rkt or Docker systems take advantage of it. Priority queues for backgrounds writes to disk are really exciting. Normally the disks on this machine aren’t used that heavily but it would short circuit some writes definitely. I doubt I’ll ever have need for my applications but I could see the new support for cache allocation as being really useful.

For the networking per-UID routing sounds interesting. I could see some useful setups for that on multiuser systems like bastions or jump hosts to prevent users from accessing certain subnets.

And that is all folks!

Reviewing the system

Only really interesting message from dmesg was the following. Probably why the sensors always look messed up for the CPU temperatures. May also be the wrong sensor.

[ 15.827577] i5500_temp 0000:00:14.3: Sensor seems to be disabled

Temperatures seem reasonable for the board so I’m not going to compalin there.

There are several failed internal services. The first two are system installed and I don’t really care besides systemd complaining about them. They are Apache2 and ISC DHCP6. The reaminder is a bad link against a shared library which was upgraded. Looks like at some point I thought it was a good idea to install Apache2, either that or the upgrade installed it. Easy enough to remove.

The failed library was as simple as removing the defunct gems and reinstalling.