The Debian Team discovered a ext4 data corruption issue in kernel 6.1.64-1.
This information was posted on Dec. 9, 2023.
The Debian maintainer and other Debian Team members discuss it here:
Further down in the bug report Sebastian Niehaus explains a workaround and creating a file that may help with the unattended upgrades. He say's it should block the buggy kernel.
FYI: there is a nice workaround to avoid upgrading to the affected kernel:
https://octodon.social/@alienghic/111554146479489358
I took a screenshot of the instructions so you can see it better.
The rest of the discussion on that page is very good information. I recommend reading it as you may find that you will have to follow what is being explained and exercised.
To save my own sanity on this I created that file with nano:-
debian-box:~$ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/buggy-kernel
# avoid kernel with ext4 bug
# 1057843
Package: linux-image-*
Pin: version 6.1.64-1
Pin-Priority: -1
And took one additional step at finding out if the unattended upgrades were active on my Debian system. To find out I ran:
sudo systemctl status unattended-upgrades.service
The command-line returned:
Unit unattended-upgrades.service could not be found
Had the unattended upgrades been active, the terminal would have returned:
Active: active running and shown the date and the path from /lib/systemd/system/unattended-upgrades.service
It's refreshing to know that the Debian Team stays on top of bugs and other issues.
On another note, I'll be performing a fresh installation of Devuan (devuan_daedalus_5.0.0_amd64) which is based on Debian stable and is free of systemd.
Additional information----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's helpful to join the Debian Mailing List. This way when things go wrong the developers that write about issues and fixes that they discover comes to your e-mail inbox.
Keeping your Debian secure is essential so keeping up to date on the security things is helpful too.
As we move into the new year I'll write and post a article on Devuan and share how things went.
As always, drive your Linux safe and have a Happy New Year! "2024"
Alex