Is there a way to install a 6.16 or 6.17 kernel on proxmox?

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Steve087

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Sep 15, 2025
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Hi have installed Proxmox on my new MiniPC and have noticed a couple of issues.

First, my USB ports (keyboard, mouse) do not seem to be stable and have a couple of drop-outs (this can already happen during proxmox installation).

I first ignored this because of the headless nature of proxmox. However since I did not manage to get igpu passthrough working (AMD reset bug?) I decided to also install KDE Plasma as desktop environment on top of proxmox. In Plasma I have disabled all power saving option (e.g. suspend, turn off screen,...).

Problem 1 - USB:
Now since I currently only have 1 keyboard and 1 mouse I have to move them back and forth between the proxmox MiniPC and my Desktop. Doing so I noticed twice now, that at a certain point the proxmox MiniPC can not properly initialize my mouse and keyboard. At this point I need to reboot to fix it.

Problem 2 - GPU:
I also noticed, that if I move the mouse fast in Plasma that I get graphical artifacts. I saw the same behavior while testing igpu passthrough but I ignored it at this time).

I first thought that both must be a HW issue but I have the exact same behavior on both my AI X1 PRO.

Booting the daily Ubuntu live image (questing-desktop-amd64.iso) resolves both issues.

Therefore I believe that firmware/drivers/kernel are not new enough and don't fully support my HW. How can I solve this in proxmox?
Is there a way to install a newer kernel e.g. 6.17 and/or newer firmware? If so, how?

Any help is appreciated! Thank you very much!
 
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Ok, I have worked on this for over a week. I kept having Apparmor issues, as the newer kernels changed it, and my podman container was causing it to crash, and made my system unstable. Then today I had the bright idea to just patch it back to the 6.14 apparmor. Well, that didn't compile, but with the help of Cursor. I was able to make a 2nd patch that fixed the older apparmor to work with 6.17.

https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-kernel is the git of all the changes I made to make it work. along with https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-firmware for the firmware. So you can compile it yourself, if you don't trust me. (I wouldn't trust any random person building the kernel)

But if you are willing to risk it, I have my compiled debs here: https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-kernel/releases/tag/6.17.0-5.5
 
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I would not recommend building/installing a kernel with random apparmor patching that you don't fully understand and trust.
 
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fabian said:
I would not recommend building/installing a kernel with random apparmor patching that you don't fully understand and trust.
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That is true. I would never use this in a production server :). The whole reason I was interested in doing this myself is that my mini-PC that has 4 Intel I224 Ethernet controllers that passthrough worked perfectly on all proxmox kernels until 6.14, then it has this error:
Code: 
[   74.495248] DMAR: DRHD: handling fault status reg 3
[   74.495267] DMAR: [DMA Read NO_PASID] Request device [02:00.0] fault addr 0x57e8000 [fault reason 0x0c] non-zero reserved fields in PTE
[   74.916650] DMAR: DRHD: handling fault status reg 3
[   74.916670] DMAR: [DMA Read NO_PASID] Request device [01:00.0] fault addr 0x565d000 [fault reason 0x0c] non-zero reserved fields in PTE
And I was hoping that a newer Kernel would fix it.... It didn't. I still have to use proxmox-boot-tool kernel pin 6.11.11-2-pve for it to work. Which it no big deal.

It has been a learning experience. I'm sure that there will be an opt-in for Kernel 6.17 soon enough, as Ubuntu 25.10 comes out with it, and Proxmox adds their patches to it. I tried to use the patches from 6.14 on it, and removed the backpatches that Proxmox did that were already in 6.17.

https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-kernel/blob/pve-6.17test/patches/kernel/0013-apparmor-fix6.17.patch is the differences from 6.14, It also includes the 0011-apparmor-expect-msg_namelen-0-for-recvmsg-calls.patch in it.

Although you are correct that it is buggy. There is a kernel panic when shutting down a LXC container with this Kernel. I just made a patch and am compiling it now to see if it fixes it.

Kernel 6.17 also changes the IOMMU groups from previous kernels. My IOMMU group numbers were -1 vs on 6.14 and even 6.16. Which means that I have to change my Resource Mapping for PCI devices between 6.17, and the other kernels.
 
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@jaminmc thank you very much. Building my own Kernel is way out of my Linux skills right now. I'm not using this for production, this is just for my homelab I'm currently building (or trying to). So I will just give your Kernel a try. I want to see if the newer Kernel fixes the USB and iGPU issue. If it does then I know for sure that I only have to wait in order to get this sorted out. If the issues remain then I have to troubleshoot more...
Just out of curiosity, do you by any chance have good documentation that you are wiling to share that could teach me how to build a custom kernel?
 
I couldn't get my APU to work for passthrough, unless I turned off above 4G in my bios. Maybe you are experienceing something like that.
 
jaminmc said:
I couldn't get my APU to work for passthrough, unless I turned off above 4G in my bios. Maybe you are experienceing something like that.
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I had passthrough working including video output but it did not survive VM reboots and it didn't matter if I rebooted the VM from within or from outside via Proxmox. I did try different reset methods but unfortunately none worked. I played around with the amount of video-memory the BIOS assigns to the GPU but also here no success. However I never experimented with "above 4G". Thank you for the hint, I will try that...
 

Is there a way to install a 6.16 or 6.17 kernel on proxmox? Short answer is its is possible, the long story is ...The source code is public and anyone can apply it, in laboratory conditions. If they have the courage, they can also do it in real life. And share the result in the community.​


Have a nice day.

​

 
The latest Ubuntu kernel 6.17.1-6.6, patched with the Proxmox Magic, is available at the following link: https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-kernel/releases/tag/6.17.1-6.6. This kernel includes patches that address AppArmor bugs identified by the using Cursor.

The initial issue encountered was a kernel panic when running a Pod in podman on a LXC container with ZFS. The Overlay fuse driver was responsible for this panic, which has since been resolved. Another issue involved a false deny due to the kernel misinterpreting a socket as a filename.

It appears that the Proxmox team is also testing the same kernel according to https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-kernel.git;a=summary, but has not yet applied any AppArmor patches for 6.17. @fabian, The relevant patches are available for consideration:

- https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-kern...NULL-pointer-dereference-in-aa_file_per.patch
- https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-kern...-fix-unix-socket-sendmsg-classification.patch

The Patches fix some regressions in AppArmor 5.0. https://github.com/jaminmc/pve-kernel/blob/pve-6.17test/APPARMOR-5.0-REGRESSION-FIXES.md is a writeup on the bugs and fixes.

This has been stable on my machines with podman, GPU, PCIe, and USB passthrough. Also using ZFS.
 
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bcachefs works with current 6.14 kernel, i tested it a few days ago. But didn't get that good performance from it.
 
RolandK said:
good to hear, i was just asking myself how to get to 6.16+ for being able to test with bcachefs dkms package, which needs 6.16 at minimum.
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Even though Linus Torvalds decided not to include it in 6.17, you could also try compiling it in the kernel yourself, like how Proxmox compiles in ZFS. Although after a quick Google search, It seems that it is not something for the faint of heart, and https://ostechnix.com/install-bcachefs-apt-repository-debian-ubuntu/ would be much easier. Since Proxmox uses modified Ubuntu kernels, You should use plucky for the 6.14 kernel, and questing for the 6.17 kernel.

ness1602 said:
bcachefs works with current 6.14 kernel, i tested it a few days ago. But didn't get that good performance from it.
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That could be why they say 6.16 for the minimum?
 
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