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When I tried to upgrade my server to ubuntu 12.04, it gave this message, but the upgrade process will continue :

 WARNING:root:estimate_kernel_size_in_boot() returned '0'?

This is a VPS server on openvz. I just upgraded from 11.04 to 11.10 without any problems. But what to do now?

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  • Can you access a shell?
    – Mitch
    Jun 5, 2012 at 3:58
  • @Mitch Yes its working. I tried to upgrade through it. I didn't upgrade to 12.04... cancelled it after seeing the error!
    – THpubs
    Jun 5, 2012 at 4:00
  • Can you include the output of sudo fdisk -l
    – Mitch
    Jun 5, 2012 at 4:03
  • @Mitch It says "cannot open /proc/partitions"
    – THpubs
    Jun 5, 2012 at 4:06
  • Do you have other OS's on you system
    – Mitch
    Jun 5, 2012 at 4:09

1 Answer 1

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But what to do now?

Continue. The warning is expected, since OpenVZ VPSs do not have their own kernels -- they operate on the physical host's kernel. OpenVZ is more like an enhanced chroot rather than a true virtual machine in that respect.

Important - if your running kernel is less than 2.6.24

Please check your current kernel version with uname -r. If it is less than 2.6.24, the upgrade will fail half-way with a glibc error. That happens because the glibc included by default with 12.04 requires a minimum 2.6.24 kernel -- glibc are the critical C libraries used by every application.

At that point, you will need the instructions [from this answer], as pasted below:


I've set up a PPA containing a recompiled libc which is compiled to work on 2.6.18 or newer (please check uname -r!), and it should override the current libc provided by Precise. Just add ppa:izx/ovz-libc, update, and it should let you get past this. Specifically, something like this:

apt-add-repository ppa:izx/ovz-libc
apt-get update
apt-get -f install
do-release-upgrade

and continue on until the upgrade completes successfully. I highly recommend NOT replacing any changed or non-existent config files.

I will be keeping the ppa updated as and when libc is updated upstream. The PPA package includes a pin so that it will only be updated when the new fixed libc is available on the PPA, not when it first appears in the official repositories.

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    It worked but it took my server offline :P There were some issues with openvz and 12.04. Thanks to my host's support, we fixed it :D
    – THpubs
    Jun 5, 2012 at 7:58
  • Just gave this a go but I'm still getting gcc errors when trying to run apt-get -f install: gcc: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by gcc)
    – nurikabe
    Feb 20, 2013 at 20:38
  • This PPA didn't work for Virtuozzo at least. Testing from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 it fails to me with: "/lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by locale)"
    – shakaran
    Aug 15, 2013 at 9:06

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