Recently it seems like the linux kernel minor version is updating a lot. Every time it updates my internet completely disappears, wi-fi icon is gone, if I plug in an ethernet cable I get nothing, network menu shows nothing. The first time it took all day to figure out. Now every time the kernel updates, I have to do the following:
in grub menu, select the previous kernel from advanced options, e.g. today I booted into 5.8.0-40-generic, then ran
sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-headers-5.8.0-41-generic
sudo apt install --reinstall linux-modules-extra-5.8.0-41-generic
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
then reboot as normal without advanced options and the world is back in order. It happens about once a week at the moment. Any idea why this might happen?
Thanks in advance!
Update:
Not sure if this helps, but I did
lspci | awk '/[Nn]et/ {print $1}' | xargs -i% lspci -ks %
04:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev bb)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260
Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
Kernel modules: iwlwifi
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Killer E220x Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13)
Subsystem: Dell Killer E220x Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Kernel driver in use: alx
Kernel modules: alx
These drivers seem to be in the headers
https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal-updates/arm64/linux-headers-5.8.0-29-generic-64k/filelist
Next time it happens, I will run the command above and see if the kernel drivers are not found before doing the fixes. I'll also try only doing the headers to see if that fixes it (so the extras module can maybe be excluded as a culprit)
Update:
For anyone experiencing this, using @Pilot6's suggestion below fixed the problem, the latest update had the hwe things in the download list and the kernel version updated with no problems!. I found some more details about this here:
