"effective kernel" status is misleading

[Paul Collins]

ksplice reported its patching status by means of a reported "effective kernel" version, and the livepatch charm parroted this reporting, but using the "kernel" field from "canonical-livepatch status". But as far as I can tell, this is just the running kernel, and livepatch in fact reports patching status with the other two fields, e.g.:

ubuntu@juju-4da59b22-9710-4e69-840a-be49ee864a97-machine-0:~$ uname -a
Linux juju-4da59b22-9710-4e69-840a-be49ee864a97-machine-0 4.4.0-79-generic #100-Ubuntu SMP Wed May 17 19:58:14 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
ubuntu@juju-4da59b22-9710-4e69-840a-be49ee864a97-machine-0:~$ dpkg -l linux-image-$(uname -r) | grep ^.i
ii linux-image-4.4.0-79-generic 4.4.0-79.100 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ubuntu@juju-4da59b22-9710-4e69-840a-be49ee864a97-machine-0:~$ uptime
 02:08:04 up 82 days, 17:54, 2 users, load average: 5.46, 6.28, 6.70
ubuntu@juju-4da59b22-9710-4e69-840a-be49ee864a97-machine-0:~$ sudo canonical-livepatch status
kernel: 4.4.0-79.100-generic
fully-patched: true
version: "29.1"

ubuntu@juju-4da59b22-9710-4e69-840a-be49ee864a97-machine-0:~$ _

The livepatch charm should probably switch to reporting these fields, and refer to the kernel, if at all, as "running kernel". My assumption is that fully-patched will change to "false" if livepatch has problems talking to the servers, but it may also be worth verifying this with livepatch upstream first.

[Barry Price (barryprice)]

That's a good spot, I guess we assumed the "kernel" status line was the equivalent of ksplice's "effective kernel" without ever confirming this.

I'm leaning towards a status output of something like "Kernel x.y-z is fully patched (version)", or "Kernel x.y.z is not fully patched (version)" depending on the value of 'fully-patched'...

[Barry Price (barryprice)]

Okay, the linked MP will change this to the running version and the value of 'patchState', e.g. 'nothing-to-apply' for a fully patched system.