Upgrade Debian 10 to 11

Resources

• Debian 11: Upgrading from Debian 10

Introduction

I’ve been running Debian 10 with kernel 4.19 on my server for a long time. However, recently I’ve had some troubles with it. Especially when running software in the development stage. I got the following error when upgrading my Ethereum node,

mdbx_env_open:16183 Linux prior to 5.4 requires MDBX_WRITEMAP because of a flaw of unified
page/buffer cache.

This is related to the github issue where the problem has been reproduced on different kernels <5.4.

Upgrading Debian 10 (Buster) to 11 (Bullseye)

cat /etc/debian_version

yields 10.11.

When upgrading to Debian 11 it’s recommended to follow the official steps. An overview of the steps,

• Backup your config data.
• Change buster to bullseye /etc/apt/sources.list. Note that buster/updates has changed to bullseye-security.
• sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade

now cat /etc/debian_version shows 11.2 and uname -r (kernel release) shows 5.16.0-4-amd64.

Problems after upgrading

You might have some dependency issues. E.g., I’m using Discord, where the two dependencies libappindicator1 and libindicator7 were not part of Debian 11 Bullseye so I had to install them manually with dpkg -i.