Would upgrading processors/motherboards stop my 10.04 lucid from working?

Question

Or will I have to reinstall the operating system, etc?

I'm thinking of upgrading a core 2 quad to either an i7 or a phenom, which also involve changing motherboards.

What considerations with regards to the installed ubuntu distribution are there? Would it magically recognize the new hardware and just work as is, or will a new installation need to be done?

Answer 1

As long as the processor is capable of handling the same arch, and you didn't compile a custom kernel that is missing anything, then yes it should all work perfectly. Just to clarify, if you are running a x86_64 system and the new processor isn't capable of 64-bit then yes it will break. Does not apply for working in the other direction, all 64-bit capable processors can handle x86 kernel and apps. Having said so, if you are downgrading and are running a custom kernel with the processor type set to i686, but the downgraded processor can only handle i386... unbootable system. However you are upgrading so you shouldn't have to worry about that.

Having said so, if you are just using a kernel from the repos then you are alright. Ubuntu compiles all of their kernels with compatibility for i386 processors, and with the majority of all distributed kernel modules included. This is to ensure maximum compatibility. In other words, yes it will magically figure it out, lol. Mainly because a basic ubuntu system has compatibility with most hardware on the market, you just only use what the kernel detects at boot or while running.

Answer 2

Most new hardware will Just Work with your new motherboard, but there are some things you probably want to do or check before (or after) you change to the new motherboard:

• If you had on-board graphics that used a proprietary graphics driver, then remove the driver using the hardware drivers tool. If you use the same graphics card (not on-board) in both, don't remove the driver of course.
• If you had on-board graphics with an open source driver but manually changed xorg.conf to set a special option, maybe remove that option too (unless you know it will work for the new motherboard's IGP too).
• If you are using an onboard ethernet adapter (which is probably the case), the new adapter will become eth1 instead of eth0. If you want the on-board ethernet of the new motherboard to be eth0 again, you can run sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to remove the file that stores adapter->name pairs (this is stored to make sure that the same adapter always gets the same name, which is often important in computers used as servers, gateways, firewalls or routers, but probably not so useful when you switch motherboards). This file will be rewritten on the next boot, so either do it the last thing before changing the motherboard, or the first thing after changing it.
• If your old motherboard had an on-board RAID adapter ("fakeraid") and you were actually using it for RAID, you might need a new motherboard that has a compatible RAID adapter. If you don't use RAID, or you are using linux software RAID, it doesn't matter.
• If you were booting with a special kernel parameter because of some compatibility issue (e.g. noapic), you probably want to remove it.

Maybe other people can add other gotchas they encountered?

Answer 3

Problems after upgrading harware may arise mainly from graphic cards or onboard graphics. These may not work the same as they used to and may need a different driver.

Having said that it is good advice to remove all proprietary drivers on your system before changing hardware.

Make sure your backups are up to date