Proxmox (as a company) - what the HELL are you doing? Kernel update to 7 broke networking IN A VM

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Kingneutron

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Feb 21, 2024
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I use PDM and noticed a kernel upgrade available to 7.0 for my 3x PBS VMs. Upgraded (1) and rebooted it. Should be simple, right?

NO NETWORK after reboot. WTF?

This is my time off work for homelab maint, I'm not gonna try and troubleshoot that dumpster fire. Restored the VM from backup and all is fine now. If I have to pin the kernel to 6.17 I will.

But come on - if you guys want to be taken seriously as an Enterprise-level solution, DO NOT RELEASE BREAKING UPDATES!! I am not your beta tester, I rely on this stuff to be reliable to upgrade, even for homelab! Debian is supposed to be SIMPLE!

My $DAYJOB boss is having me evaluate Proxmox and PBS as a possible side-by-side solution for our Vmware ESXI stuff. There is NO WAY I can recommend going forward with proxmox at work if this kind of stuff keeps happening with what should be a run-of-the-mill upgrade process.

Please tell your devs to get their s--t together. Thank God I did this at home first instead of at work, your obviously untested rev would have made me look bad. I have been paying out of my own pocket for a support license for 2 years now, but this kind of breakage happening again would make me seriously rethink supporting proxmox going forward.

As an aside, this event made me rethink my backup strategy. I had been backing up my 3x PBS VMs about twice a week to other PBS VMs. If all 3 PBS instances had gone down at once after a simple upgrade... I have now scheduled .tar backups daily to local storage so I always have something to restore.
 
7.0 is a test kernel,not an enterprise kernel atm, so if you are okay with breakages you use this kernel. If not, you usually pay for enterprise subscription.
Why would you be angry on a company giving you a test repo?
 
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Kingneutron said:
I use PDM and noticed a kernel upgrade available to 7.0 for my 3x PBS VMs. Upgraded (1) and rebooted it. Should be simple, right?

NO NETWORK after reboot. WTF?

This is my time off work for homelab maint, I'm not gonna try and troubleshoot that dumpster fire. Restored the VM from backup and all is fine now. If I have to pin the kernel to 6.17 I will.

But come on - if you guys want to be taken seriously as an Enterprise-level solution, DO NOT RELEASE BREAKING UPDATES!! I am not your beta tester, I rely on this stuff to be reliable to upgrade, even for homelab! Debian is supposed to be SIMPLE!

My $DAYJOB boss is having me evaluate Proxmox and PBS as a possible side-by-side solution for our Vmware ESXI stuff. There is NO WAY I can recommend going forward with proxmox at work if this kind of stuff keeps happening with what should be a run-of-the-mill upgrade process.

Please tell your devs to get their s--t together. Thank God I did this at home first instead of at work, your obviously untested rev would have made me look bad. I have been paying out of my own pocket for a support license for 2 years now, but this kind of breakage happening again would make me seriously rethink supporting proxmox going forward.

As an aside, this event made me rethink my backup strategy. I had been backing up my 3x PBS VMs about twice a week to other PBS VMs. If all 3 PBS instances had gone down at once after a simple upgrade... I have now scheduled .tar backups daily to local storage so I always have something to restore.
Click to expand...
Seriously? Did you even try to understand what you were doing with this? 7.0 is not production release code. This was self inflicted unfortunately. I would suggest starting over after reading some basic installation materials and stick with 6.x code until 7 is ready for production.

So yes, if you are using kernel 7, you are a beta tester lol.
 
No. I think it’s fair to voice my concerns here.

Anyone other than subscribers could be affected.

This is an opt-in feature, but it is located in the no-subscription repository rather than the test repository.

if it really was a kernel issue, he was the victim.

*Since I haven’t encountered the issue myself, I can’t say for sure without knowing the cause.

t.lamprecht

Thread 'Opt-in Linux 7.0 Kernel for Proxmox VE 9 available on test and no-subscription'

We recently uploaded the 7.0 (rc6) kernel to our repositories. The current default kernel for the Proxmox VE 9 series is still 6.17, but 7.0 is now an option.

We plan to use the 7.0 kernel as the new default for the upcoming Proxmox VE 9.2 and Proxmox Backup Server 4.2 releases planned later in Q2.
This follows our tradition of upgrading the Proxmox VE kernel to match the current Ubuntu version until we reach an Ubuntu LTS release, at which point we will only provide newer kernels as an opt-in option. The 7.0 kernel is based on the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute release.

We have run this...
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Known Issues:

None at the time of writing.

Edit 2026-04-20: the kernel is now also available on the no-subscription repository.
 
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uzumo said:
Anyone other than subscribers could be affected.
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It is not (yet) installed automatically during updates, at least not if you’re using the non-subscription repositories. You have to explicitly install it via apt install proxmox-kernel-7.0.

How do I know? I’m using the non-subscription repositories and just ran an apt full-upgrade on PBS and all my PVE hosts. And guess what I’m still on 6.17.13-3-pve. ;)
 
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I'm sorry. It's fine if it's a test repository, but a “no-subscription” repository isn't intended for testing purposes.

Also, I don't think the “option” part implies it's for testing, does it?

If there really is an issue and testing hasn't been done yet, I think it's better not to put it in a repository like that.

If that was the intention, I think it's okay to voice your concerns.

*The important thing is whether there is actually a problem with the kernel.
 
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uzumo said:
Also, I don't think the “option” part implies it's for testing, does it?
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3rd paragrapoh in the post you linked:

We have run this kernel on some of our test setups over the last few days without encountering any significant issues. However, for production setups, we strongly recommend either using the 6.17-based kernel or testing on similar hardware/setups before upgrading any production nodes to 7.0.

uzumo said:
If there really is an issue and testing hasn't been done yet, I think it's better not to put it in a repository like that.
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What do you mean by 'putting it in a repository like that'? They added it to the repository, but it doesn't upgrade by itself, so how is that an issue? Just because people can’t resist installing the latest version of everything straight away doesn't mean it shouldn't be released for those who want to test it, or for those who have newer hardware that could benefit from it, or might even need it.
 
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uzumo said:
a “no-subscription” repository isn't intended for testing purposes.
Click to expand...
Let me quote the official wiki about the No-Subscription Repository
As the name suggests, you do not need a subscription key to access this repository. It can be used for testing and non-production use. It’s not recommended to use this on production servers, as these packages are not always as heavily tested and validated.
Click to expand...

Packages are landing in the Test Repository first. Depending on feedback from the community and internal testing (iirc), it will be moved to the No-Subscription Repository and after some time with additional feedback from the community and internal testing, it will be moved to the Enterprise Repository.
 
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I was mistaken. Since I don’t have a subscription, I suppose there’s nothing I can do about it.

But… to be treated almost exactly the same as a test repository? It’s sad that there’s nothing we can do about issues outside of Enterprise.
 
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Stubennerd said:
Let me quote the official wiki about the No-Subscription Repository


Packages are landing in the Test Repository first. Depending on feedback from the community and internal testing (iirc), it will be moved to the No-Subscription Repository and after some time with additional feedback from the community and internal testing, it will be moved to the Enterprise Repository.
Click to expand...
Yes, but in this case it’s not really an issue at all, because even in the no-subscription repository you still have to explicitly install the new kernel. And if someone does that without fully reading the above post, that’s on them. And yes, if you use the testing repository, then even more so. ;)
 
uzumo said:
I was mistaken. Since I don’t have a subscription, I suppose there’s nothing I can do about it.
Click to expand...
Proxmox keeps at least one or two older kernel version installed, so it should still be possible to boot the previous kernel if needed.

uzumo said:
But… to be treated almost exactly the same as a test repository? It’s sad that there’s nothing we can do about issues outside of Enterprise.
Click to expand...

That’s simply not correct. It first appeared in the testing repository and only moved into the no-subscription repository about two days ago. And even now, it still isn’t installed by default—you only get it if you explicitly install it.

I’ve been using the no-subscription repositories for years, and they are generally very stable. In practice, no-sub is much closer to enterprise than to testing—if anything, it feels like (I don’t have exact data) it often takes longer for packages to move from testing to no-sub than from no-sub to enterprise.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that a bug won’t occasionally slip through. This is partly because the developers can’t realistically test new packages and kernels across as wide a range of hardware as the community uses them on after they’re released to the no-sub repos. However, you can drastically reduce the risk of encountering serious bugs by avoiding installing optional bleeding-edge packages, such as a new kernel. ;)
 
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Instead of complaining and just rejecting any responsibility for your own actions of installing an opt-in kernel marked as experimental, that was moved to no-subscriptions to make it easier to test without pulling in other updates for less experienced users, which we hardly can take serious, it would be really great to get actually some details about the setup and config here so that we can look into this. As we definitively take such reports serious, but for that to work we need - to repeat myself for the points' sake - details not ramblings so that we can look into actually reproducing and - depending on the outcome - fixing this.
 
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