Is it safe to upgrade to ubuntu 16.10

[paladox]

Hi, I'm wondering is it safe to upgrade to 16.10 please or will that cause problems. I am asking since another LTS release won't happen for another year.

[benhillis]

We have not been testing 16.10 internally so you will likely run into some issues.

[paladox]

Oh, thanks for replying.

[therealkenc]

16.10 primarily suffers from #1005 as of this writing.

[fpqc]

You will also probably run into #555 if you go all the way to 17.04 (just mentioning for completeness) because of the strace update. But yeah, #1005 is the big blocker on a lot of stuff, since they seem to have switched to using it in a ton of GNU devtools.

[stehufntdev]

@therealkenc, is the failure on 16.10 the same clone call with CLONE_VM|CLONE_VFORK|SIGCHLD? If so do you have a strace of an example failure on 16.10 that we can review?

[therealkenc]

Correct that's the pattern, not the namespace stuff (which got subsumed in there).

I believe, but haven't proved conclusively, it's a glibc thing. For example clang also gets the same error on 16.10 (message) but not on 16.04.

I've updated the test case in #1005 so it actually compiles clean with recent gcc and included the strace. I didn't include the strace at the time because it is just:

[...blah blah blah]
clone(child_stack=0xacef60, flags=CLONE_VM|CLONE_VFORK|SIGCHLD) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
[...blah blah, not working]

You don't need to install 16.10 to run the test case because I'm deliberately calling clone with the pattern directly.

[stehufntdev]

Thanks for the follow-up! I was able to get a repro of this on 16.10 and updated the code to handle clone vfork (i.e. CLONE_VM|CLONE_VFORK|SIGCHLD) the same as vfork. As part of this change we realized we have some differences in vfork and those will be patched up later.

[paladox]

@stehufntdev thank you :)

[therealkenc]

I tried Yakkety (16.10) today and all appears well so far on 15046. The apt-get dist-upgrade with an updated sources.list was utterly painless. I thought strace might break because of #555 (also reported in #1578), but the strace version shipped with Yakkety is 4.12, and strace won't fail on #555 until version 4.15. I'll post again if I come across anything glaring, but I think you can put a fork in this issue because it looks done.

[edit] One tip I forgot to mention for anyone trying this at home. You want to make sure the system dbus is active before running apt-get upgrade, because some package scripts expect it to be live (which is always the case on Real Ubuntu). Dbus started working quite a while back now with AF_UNIX socket fixes #706 (message). Run:

sudo service dbus start

This advice holds for vanilla 16.04 Xenial that ships with WSL too by the way.

[stehufntdev]

@therealkenc thanks for the update! Closing this out as fixed for insider builds.

[therealkenc]

I suppose I should follow up on this one since it was marked as fixedininsiderbuilds at my behest; which, it technically was at the time due to #1005 being addressed. Unfortunately as of 16176, upgrading to Ubuntu 16.10 is "not safe" per issue title, due to #1878 and friends. I don't think it is necessarily worth re-opening this issue (we have plenty), but it bears clarification in case anyone lands here in a tracker search.