Earlier this month there was a brief power outage while my RPi was running (Raspbian). As soon as power was restored, I rebooted, ran sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade and then noticed that the kernel version had changed from the previous 3.18.11 to 4.1.6.
Isn't sudo rpi-update required to get a new kernel?
No, it isn't. apt-get upgrade (better use apt-get dist-upgrade) will update all packages including any kernel updates that are posted.
No, it's not "better use dist-upgrade", there is a reason why apt has two different upgrades: they do two different things. Check the man to see what's the difference, and ask the brain why dist-upgrade is not always wanted.
Bye Jack
-- Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
Contrary to what the name suggests, dist-upgrade does not upgrade to the next version of the distribution. It does the same thing as upgrade, except when there is an upgrade queued that requires a new dependency to be installed it will go ahead and do that.
When you always do only "upgrade", there may be some packages that because of their upgrade require some new library that you did not have before (e.g. some builtin code that was found to be vulnerable has been replaced by a call to an existing shared library), and they will not be upgraded.
The chance of this happening increases when you have trimmed-down the system to the minimum required for your needs at that time.
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