Lag time between stable kernel releases and that kernel being available to nixos

Development
1

On https://www.kernel.org the latest stable release is 5.10.60. How does this patch version of the kernel get into the stable nixos channel? How many days does that typically take? For reference I’m running nixos stable:

 - system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 5.10.52, NixOS, 21.05.2518.97c5d0cbe76 (Okapi)`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.3.15`
 - channels(adam): `"nixos-21.05.2486.8ac785da984"`
 - channels(root): `"nixos-21.05.2518.97c5d0cbe76, nixos-hardware"`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos`

And my kernel version is still 5.10.52. I’m asking because these “patch” versions often contain security fixes and I’d like to have more insight into the update process.

When I list my nix-channels I only have the one:
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-21.05

2

The commit active on your system should have 5.10.57:

$ nix eval nixpkgs/97c5d0cbe76\#linuxPackages.kernel.version
"5.10.57"

Did you reboot after the most recent updates?

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4

I thought I had but I rebooted again and now uname -r returns 5.10.57. Thank you!

One additional noob question: when I run nix eval nixpkgs/97c5d0cbe76\#linuxPackages.kernel.version My shell treats it as a path and complains it cannot find the file. What am I missing to query this information myself?

5

A flake enabled nix.

Nix 2.3 without flakes does provide some mechanism to retrieve that information, though I do not remember that anymore.

6

Turns out you can do this inside the nix repl.

  • load up the nixpkgs
  • linuxPackages.kernel.version returns 5.10.57

EDIT:
Actually you can also eval it this way directly without the repl: nix eval nixpkgs.linuxPackages.kernel.version

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