As part of the rollout for refreshing the cloudmetrics boxes, the new hardware purchased exhibited problems out of the box (See T297814 ). In the end, it appears the hardware wasn't well supported by the the combination of operating system and kernel (debian buster and kernel 4.19).
As debian releases age, the default kernel may not support newer hardware. In this particular case, buster is now the oldstable release and has an older kernel as well.
When new hardware is purchased, how can we ensure the kernel/firmware/OS supports it?
I can foresee some options (and others, please suggest and discuss!)
- Encourage new hardware to use the newest stable debian OS + kernel (or even backported kernel?)
- Assuming we want to run a small set of kernels, provide HWE / backported kernels for older OS's, and ensure new hardware installs use these kernels.
In general, I do think it's a good idea to avoid kernel fragmentation across all physical hardware, so there are some careful choices to be made about adopting or utilizing newer or backported kernels in old releases.
If nothing else, this is a reminder that hardware issues are sometimes caused / resolved by updating the OS/kernel/firmware.