15.10 upgrade doesn't upgrade kernel

[Timothy Miller]

I have recently installed 15.10 on three systems. In one case, it was a semi-fresh install, over top of an existing 15.04 install that had been a failed upgrade from 14.10 LTS. In the other two cases, they were successful upgrades from 15.04.

In all three cases, the kernel did not get upgraded with the rest of the OS, so I had to manually run this:
sudo apt-get install linux-generic

Only then did I get the right kernel. And only then could I get things like nfs-server to work, so the failure to upgrade the kernel causes all sorts of other problems, because a lot of other packages are dependent on having the right kernel.

I'm not the only person to notice this. I found the fix from this forum post:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/689358/ubuntu-kernel-not-updating-with-15-10

[Timothy Miller (theosib)]

I was talking about this with people in IRC, and I have a few more things to add:

(1) When upgrading from LTS, I'm told that there isn't a linux-generic package, because the kernel comes from something else. If upgrading from LTS is allowed to complete "without error," and it fails to install the kernel package, then that's a bug.

(2) That doesn't explain why my upgrade of a non-LTS systems didn't get the newer kernel. I'll attach one of the upgrade logs.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This is bug 1509305 which I am working on now.