I've seen reports of systems showing a kernel panic during boot with an "unable to mount fs" message, although I haven't encountered that specific problem myself. My issue was frequent freezes when waking from suspend, and switching back to an LTS kernel resolved it. Has the 7.x series become stable enough to upgrade safely, or is it still better to stay on LTS?
3 Answers
Some people have been running 7.x kernels successfully on current Debian-based systems without seeing kernel panics. Still, a kernel upgrade isn’t automatically safe for every machine: keep the LTS kernel installed in the boot menu, make sure you have current backups, and test suspend/resume and any virtualization tools before making the newer kernel your default.
Many of the reports seem tied to a particular distribution, especially systems using VirtualBox. That may indicate an interaction between the kernel, the distribution’s packaging, and VirtualBox rather than a universal kernel 7.x problem. If you use virtualization, testing with a newer VirtualBox version or another backend such as QEMU/KVM may help.
By this point, a widespread kernel panic affecting every 7.x release would usually be well documented and likely cause release delays. I haven’t personally encountered one, so I’d expect the general kernel series to be usable, though individual hardware and distributions can still behave differently.
That matches what I was seeing—the reports I found seemed concentrated around one distribution and VirtualBox. I’ll test the newer kernel carefully instead of assuming the issue affects every setup.