Double Debian update: 11.11 and 12.7 arrive at once
But Bullseye's days are numbered and it's time to think about upgrading
The latest update to Debian "Bookworm" arrives at the same time as the last ever update to "Bullseye," and there's trouble ahead for Nvidia legacy users.
The end of August saw two new point upgrades for Debian fans. The project published updates for two separate releases: one for Bookworm in the form of Debian 12.7, and, on the same day, the last for Bullseye with Debian 11.11.
This is the sixth point release for Bookworm because 12.3 never happened. As usual, no package versions are bumped: 12.7 collects together all the updates released since 12.6, so it contains just over 50 updates and bug fixes.
One thing it doesn't contain is the user-space tools for maintaining bcachefs file systems. The package bcachefs-tools has been dropped, with maintainer Jonathan Carter describing it as too buggy to be anything but experimental. Although for now the file system itself is still implemented in C, release 1.2 of the user-space tools were rewritten in Rust, which caused headaches for the package maintainers, as he elaborates in a lengthy blog post.
This isn't a critical problem right now. Debian 12 uses kernel 6.1 and bcachefs only entered the kernel with the release of kernel 6.7 at the start of the year. That means there hasn't been a long-term kernel with built-in bcachefs yet – but there surely will be soon, and some time after that, stable-release distros will start supporting it, at which point working user-space tools will be essential.
Even aside from issues around supporting constantly developing Rust tooling on a stable-release distro, the situation around the new file system remains somewhat turbulent. Soon after its release, it got an on-disk format change. Recently, developer Kent Overstreet submitted a large patch for the in-development kernel 6.11-rc5. Supreme penguin Linus Torvald was not impressed and vented his ire on the Linux kernel mailing list:
I'm starting to regret merging bcachefs.
If bcachefs can't work sanely within the normal upstream kernel release schedule, maybe it shouldn't be in the normal upstream kernel.
This is getting beyond ridiculous.
It seems unlikely that bcachefs will be dropped again, or relegated to out-of-tree testing, but it's not impossible.
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Meanwhile, the "oldstable" release gets 11.11, which contains a comparable number of bug fixes. This release is expected to the last point release for Bullseye, which appeared three years ago, meaning that its full support lifetime ended last month. Release 11.11 Bullseye is now in LTS, meaning essential fixes will still trickle out but only for its four main architectures: i386, amd64 (that is, x86-64), arm64, and armhf.
It's time for anyone still running Debian 11 to start to plan an upgrade to Debian 12. This may need some extra work if you're using graphics cards that need Nvidia legacy drivers, as we noted when looking at the Ubuntu Noble beta.
Debian 11 used kernel 5.10, but Debian 12 uses kernel 6.1. As such, it removed support for all Nvidia drivers before version 535. You can check which drivers support which GPUs on Nvidia's supported products list.
The Reg FOSS desk has two still very useful Core i7-powered ThinkPads, one T420 and one W520, whose onboard GPUs are no longer supported in Debian 12. Yes, they are over a decade old, but they're still capable machines and this missing support is a problem. ®