Kernel update should invoke shell script

[Juergen Scholz]

Binary package hint: kernel-package

I would like to make a suggestion/feature request and I hope this is the right place/package for it.
If the kernel gets updated some applications need to adjust themselves to the change. This includes Vmware and Virtualbox (not the OSE, but the sun variant with USB support) which need to compile new kernel modules.
It would be very helpful if there were a shell script in which the user could include commands that would be executed when the computer is started the first time with a new kernel.
Another script which would be invoked directly after a reboot could be helpful for other users.

I really would appreciate if someone looked into this. Thank you in advance! :-)

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Interesting idea, if it doesn't already exist! Taking it one step further, once this existed and was somewhat standard, the packages themselves could add themselves to it, making it completely transparent to the user.

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

I think this exists, it's update-notifier; I think if you drop something in /etc/kernel/postinst.d it'll get run on a new kernel install.
(I'm not sure whether it existed when you reported it 4 years ago, but it looks like update-notifier did exist back then, I just don' tknow how much it did).

[Ben Hutchings (benh-debian)]

Packages generated by kernel-package have been calling hook scripts for a long time. The maintainer scripts in Debian's linux-2.6/linux source package are derived from kernel-package and do the same. And packages generated by the upstream deb-pkg target have also done this since before the beginning of git history (Linux 2.6.12-rc2).

In 2010 Debian adopted a policy that actually specifies how these hook scripts should be used:
http://kernel-handbook.alioth.debian.org/ch-update-hooks.html

My memory is that Ubuntu's linux source package was changed to call hook scripts only after that policy existed.