Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 bionic to 20.04 focal

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04.5 (bionic) to 20.04.1 (focal) and it was one of the roughest Ubuntu upgrades I've gone through in a while. Here are the notes I took on avoiding or fixing the problems I ran into.

Preparation

Before going through the upgrade, I disabled the configurations which I know interfere with the process:

Enable etckeeper auto-commits before install by putting the following in /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf:
```
  AVOID_COMMIT_BEFORE_INSTALL=0
```
Remount /tmp as exectuable:
```
  mount -o remount,exec /tmp
```

Another step I should have taken but didn't, was to temporarily remove safe-rm since it caused some problems related to a Perl upgrade happening at the same time:

apt remove safe-rm

Network problems

After the upgrade, my network settings weren't really working properly and so I started by switching from ifupdown to netplan.io which seems to be the preferred way of configuring the network on Ubuntu now.

Then I found out that netplan.io is not automatically enabling the systemd-resolved handling of .local hostnames.

I would be able to resolve a hostname using avahi:

$ avahi-resolve --name machine.local
machine.local   192.168.1.5

but not with systemd:

$ systemd-resolve machine.local
machine.local: resolve call failed: 'machine.local' not found

$ resolvectl mdns
Global: no
Link 2 (enp4s0): no

The best solution I found involves keeping systemd-resolved and its /etc/resolv.conf symlink to /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf.

I added the following in a new /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/mdns.conf file:

[connection]
connection.mdns=1

which instructs NetworkManager to resolve mDNS on all network interfaces it manages but not register a hostname since that's done by avahi-daemon.

Then I enabled mDNS globally in systemd-resolved by setting the following in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf:

MulticastDNS=yes

before restarting both services:

systemctl restart NetworkManager.service systemd-resolved.service

With that in place, .local hostnames are resolved properly and I can see that mDNS is fully enabled:

$ resolvectl mdns
Global: yes
Link 2 (enp4s0): yes

Boot problems

For some reason I was able to boot with the kernel I got as part of the focal update, but a later kernel update rendered my machine unbootable.

Adding some missing RAID-related modules to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules:

raid1
dmraid
md-raid1

and then re-creating all initramfs:

update-initramfs -u -k all

seemed to do the trick.