Safe to upgrade packages?

Question

Upon login to my Ubuntu 22.04 server, it told me there were upgrades available. I just installed a new Nvidia driver with CUDA from source, though. Is it safe to upgrade these packages?

cees_timmerman@server:~$ nvidia-smi
Thu Feb 15 14:26:06 2024
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 545.23.08              Driver Version: 545.23.08    CUDA Version: 12.3     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  Tesla T4                       On  | 00000000:4B:00.0 Off |                    0 |
| N/A   39C    P8               9W /  70W |      2MiB / 15360MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                            |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
|=======================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                           |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
cees_timmerman@server:~$ apt list --upgradable
Listing... Done
coreutils/jammy-updates 8.32-4.1ubuntu1.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 8.32-4.1ubuntu1]
libegl-mesa0/jammy-updates 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 [upgradable from: 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1]
libgbm1/jammy-updates 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 [upgradable from: 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1]
libgl1-mesa-dev/jammy-updates 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 [upgradable from: 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1]
libgl1-mesa-dri/jammy-updates 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 [upgradable from: 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1]
libglapi-mesa/jammy-updates 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 [upgradable from: 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1]
libglx-mesa0/jammy-updates 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 [upgradable from: 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1]
libxnvctrl0/unknown 545.23.08-0ubuntu1 amd64 [upgradable from: 510.47.03-0ubuntu1]
mesa-vdpau-drivers/jammy-updates 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 [upgradable from: 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1]
python3-distupgrade/jammy-updates 1:22.04.18 all [upgradable from: 1:22.04.17]
ubuntu-release-upgrader-core/jammy-updates 1:22.04.18 all [upgradable from: 1:22.04.17]

Answer 1

In general it's not recommended to mix packages from mutually incompatible proprietary graphics driver software sources, however apt has an option that can safely simulate the upgrading of a package without actually making any changes to your system. For example, to simulate upgrading the coreutils package without actually upgrading it run the following command without being root and without sudo.

apt upgrade coreutils --simulate

You can also use the --simulate option of apt to simulate the installation or uninstallation of manually downloaded .deb files and packages that can be installed or uninstalled by apt generally.

Because the --simulate option of apt only simulates the results of an apt command on your Ubuntu's package management, it cannot simulate whether a package's new candidate version would perform better or worse than the existing version of the same package. In some cases you would need to install Ubuntu in a virtual machine to safely do that, depending on what packages are already installed.