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Just updated a server I hadn’t touched in over six years from Ubuntu 16.04 → 18.04 → 20.04 → 22.04 and it all went smoothly; not a single issue.
I can’t wait for a server with Fedora Silverblue-style upgrades (CoreOS?) that’s supported by the major VPS providers in default images. Tried a while back to get Hetzner to support CoreOS but the process appears somewhat stuck:
Scratch that, spoke too soon. The final install also succeeded but now the box won’t reboot. So all was well until 20.04 and 20.04 → 22.04 borked it.
Fun times.
Can’t even get an ssh shell in.
Meh, rebuild from scratch it is then, I guess.
Right, managed to get a diagnostic console up and it looks like the problem is a kernel panic: ‘System is deadlocked on memory’.
Appears my server had 512MB and 22.04 requires a minimum of 1GB.
Upgrading the server now…
Right, all good, it was the lack of memory.
So keep in mind if you’re going to update a server that has 512MB memory from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 that 22.04 requires a minimum of 1GB to boot.
It would be a neat if, say, oh, I don’t know, do-release-upgrade actually checked how much memory your system has and told you that before carrying out the upgrade and throwing you into a kernel panic on first boot.
@aral did you skip system requirements prereq check 
@alisca Nah, the upgrader did ;)
@aral How do they make it require 1GB to boot?! 
At least it should be satisfiable by swap, but that's at least 10x what boot should need already...
@aral I have a VM with 512M memory to which I added a 512M swap file, and I managed to upgrade it to 22.04 (just terminal access no X server) just fine. Guess I was lucky.
@aral
Can't update Fedora with 1GB memory (plus 1GB swap) either.
https://serverfault.com/questions/1120367/how-to-run-dnf-without-going-oom-on-gcp-e2-micro
It's why I switched to Arch for small machines
@aral hey, what? o_0 1GB?! Have you looked by any chance whats eating that extra half of gig?
Someone was drawing graphs of memory requirements increasing with every release of the kernel (with some particular config). Sadly, can't find it quickly enough. And in general, I really doubt it have doubled between 5.15 and... what's on 22.04?
@aral reminds me of that time when I spent 4 days trying to understand why the fsck a freshly installed Debian 12 with FDE would not boot. Went as far as unpacking initrd and all that jazz.
Then I finally got a KVM from the provider. For whatever the fsck reason nvidia module was being loaded, and that was derailing boot.
Deny-listed the module, all started working without a hitch.
Sigh. Technology.