Veeam now working with kernel 5.8 in experimental branch

[Ascaris]

The Veeam folks are working on restoring the functionality that was lost when the mainline kernel devs made some changes for 5.8. The veeamsnap module would previously not work with kernels later than 5.7, but this experimental module is working with 5.8, and you can install it and use it (just be aware that it is experimental for a reason… it has not passed all of the QA of a released version). You should already have Veeam (agent) installed before proceeding, even though it won’t work properly in 5.8. Make sure you boot from kernel 5.8 too, if you’ve been booting from another version while this is being fixed. (This will not work with 5.9 or later yet… doing that requires a kernel patch, and that’s beyond the scope of this post).

This is all based on my experience with KDE Neon, which is derived from Ubuntu. Some distros that differ from Ubuntu may have some differences.

Go to the experimental veeamsnap GitHub site, and click the green button labeled “Code.” Download the .zip to the location of your preference, then unzip it somewhere like your home folder. Navigate to that location with the terminal window, and type:

make all

It should spit up a bunch of stuff on the screen and work for a while, but hopefully it will finish without an error. If so, then enter

sudo make install

and that will install the module so that it can be used. I tried it and it worked well, fortunately.

I don’t really know what will happen when a new kernel revision (another version of 5.8) arrives– I would guess that the install procedure would have to be repeated, since the version of veeamsnap that is registered with dkms is the release version, which we already know does not work with 5.8.

There is no uninstaller, but I think that all you would need to do is to remove the driver as root, at:

/lib/modules/5.8.0-43-generic/kernel/drivers/veeam/

where you would substitute the kernel version for 5.8.0-43-generic if you are using another version. The driver’s name is veeamsnap.ko. The official release version of veeamsnap should still be installed in the LTS kernel (5.4) if you have that installed, so if you want to fully remove veeamsnap, use the package manager (apt or apt-get from the command line, Synaptic if you want to go graphical). That will also remove the veeam program, as they are tied together by dependency.

 

Group "L" (KDE Neon Linux 5.21.2 User Edition)

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