On Fri, 4 Jun 2021 at 02:51, Jon LaBadie jonfu@jgcomp.com wrote:
On Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 03:48:29PM -0600, Joe Zeff wrote:
But I believe POC's point was not about BTRFS specifically, but that something could have changed over the years to make an old rescue kernel unusable.
If you accept that premise, shouldn't the rescue kernel be periodically updated?
Drivers come and go and come back, so older hardware may
not be supported in newer kernels. The rescue kernel should work as well as it did for the original installation until some major hardware change like a new wifi card.
I have a couple old (>10 years) systems. For one, wifi was broken for many years (so I used a USB dongle) but does work in recent kernels. For the other, the ethernet driver was dropped by the kernel for a year or two (and has now come back).
The worst case would be a hardware failure that requires adding a new device (e.g., USB wifi or ethernet when the original device dies) that isn't supported by the old rescue kernel.