A little while ago, after installing Debian 13 — following six months on Testing and another six months on Sid — I ran into something I really didn’t expect.
Back then, my HP laptop was about six months old, so I naturally assumed I needed a newer kernel. I installed one from backports without thinking too much about it. It just felt logical.
A week later, I started wondering whether the default Debian kernel (6.12.90+deb13.1‑amd64) would work on my machine. I honestly expected it to fail, but I decided to try it anyway.
To my surprise, it booted perfectly.
Everything worked.
That pushed me to do a bit of research, and I realized something I didn’t know: the Debian Stable kernel isn’t actually “old”. The kernel team takes the LTS 6.12 base and backports a huge amount of newer components into it, so hardware support is much more up‑to‑date than the version number suggests.
I thought I’d share this in case someone is considering Debian and wonders whether the default kernel will handle recent hardware. In my case, it worked flawlessly.
That is interesting.
A few years ago ,I was running Debian stable (Jessie I think), and I acquired a new AMD RX6400 graphics card. … my Debian did not support it. I moved to MXahs and it had support.
After about a year , Debian moved to the next release, and support appeared.
Since then , Debian may have become more active in keeping kernels up to date, as you indicate.
There is worse … NetBSD still does not support my graphics card .. .. it was released in 2017, so they are now about 9 years behind with hardware support.
Thank you for the reply and i agree its insane to discover stuff like that . When i researched hardware support in debian , it became clear that to see if harware is going to be supported or not one should’nt think in how long ago did it came out but rather what type of components the machine is made of . In my case it was almost all intel components and realtek for the wifi and the drivers for those have been in the kernel for a while now . It is one of those things i love about debian it seems old but if you scratch the surface you discover a completelly diferent picture .
Linux has an advantage. All distros use the same kernel, so the effort to maintain drivers only has to be made once.
BSD is different … every BSD distro has its own kernel ( and its own packages) … so they each have to do all the work . Freebsd supports my graphics card, but Netbsd does not … not sure about the others. You cant take drivers from Freebsd and use them in Netbsd the kernel API is different.
Linux does not have that problem… the same drivers work everywhere because there is only one kernel API.
If anyone suggests forking the Linux kernel, we need to remind them of the disadvantages.
I confess neville i know next to nothing about bsd outside of what i was told by others . That being said it does seem like linux and bsd while they share the unix ancestry still have very different philosophies and ways of doing things .
The BSD’s are each more centrally managed.
As a user, you could run a BSD desktop and not notice any difference from Linux … except when it comes to updates or programming.
Sorry I am highjacking your topic with BSD talk.
It seems Debian stable may be more up to date than people assume.
I wonder if they had pulled stuff in from the 6.14 Kernel, that Ubuntu 24.04 shipped with? Or at least Linux Mint did, which as we all know is Ubuntu based. We are now on 6.17 and 7.0 Kernel, but Debian has always been about stability, so updating the Kernel entirely isn’t till usually a newer release of Debian. MX-Linux The modern version or AHS version, with the newer one supporting Kernel 7.0 I believe, if my eyes are not deceiving me, or my memory???
Indeed you’re right about why debian and debian based distributions don(t change kernels untill the new debian stable comes out . That being said the debian kernel does receive updates its just that they are security patches . And yes debian as my research showed me backports drivers and other components from more recent versions of the linux kernel through the testing branche and put them in the stable kernel .
There are Debian Backport but it is not the same as Debian stable.
“Backports are packages taken from the next Debian release (called “testing”),”
“Backports cannot be tested as extensively as Debian stable, and backports are provided on an as-is basis…”
That is very true howard i was not reffering to the backport repository but to the process through which debian and its kernel team backports elements from more recent kernels into the kernel used in debian stable . And the reason why it is done is to increase hardware compatibillity which is why a deliberatly old kernel can still support a six months old laptop . To put it simply debian kernel team takes an old kernel and puts newer components in it . But you are right its important to make the distinction between the backport repositories and the process used ro backport newer elements in an older kernel . I hope i was clearer sometimes i struggle at making myself clear in english .
You are right howard there is the backport repository and the backporting of newer elements into the debian stable kernel which is what the debian kernel team does . I should have made that distinction clearer . The main point of what my research showed me is that the kernel that debian ships with in its stable release is not a vanilla version of the linux kernel like you would find on kernel.org . Its a kernel that debian modified with there own patches and added components to maximise hardware support as much as possible .
Thanks for the clarification. Just to wrap it up: my point was only about
the kernel maintenance work done by the Debian Kernel Team, not the Backports
repository. We’re on the same page now.
Just to clarify one last point, Howard: the Debian Kernel Team doesn’t add new
features to the Stable kernel during the release cycle. All the extra patches,
drivers and backported components are integrated *before* Debian Stable is
published.
For Trixie, Debian selected the upstream 6.12 LTS kernel, applied their own
patches, and backported newer hardware support from later kernels. That modified
kernel is what ships as the official Debian Stable kernel. After release, it
only receives security and bugfix updates, not new features.
So the kernel version stays “old”, but the work to modernize it happens during
the development of the release, not after.
I think we might be mixing terms a bit. Debian does pick an upstream LTS kernel and apply its own patches before release, but it doesn’t backport big hardware‑enablement sets from future kernels.
Once Stable ships, it’s security and bugfix updates only.
If someone needs newer hardware support, that’s what the Backports kernel is for.
No worries, Howard — we’re actually saying the same thing, just about different
stages of the release.
Debian doesn’t add new hardware support *after* Stable ships. During the cycle
it’s security and bugfix updates only, as you said.
What I meant is that before releasing Stable, Debian takes the upstream LTS
kernel and applies its own patch set. That includes fixes and drivers from
newer kernels that are safe to integrate. This is why the kernel shipped in
Stable isn’t a vanilla kernel.org kernel and usually supports newer hardware
than the version number suggests.
After release: only security/bugfixes.
Before release: Debian’s own patching work.
… one last time?