Hi Noah, Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to do - run a lean cloud kernel on this appliance instead of the full generic kernel I have to use now.
As for whether this is common enough - I don't know, I am just one data point. I can explain: The task is to connect to a fortinet VPN. These are very common in this part of the world. The vendor provides a linux client but it is targeted for desktops. Pulls in gtk and a whole x11 stack as dependencies. Has a command line interface but even this needs a lot of handholding. Not really suitable for a cloud environment. Not lean. Then I found openfortivpn. Open source, packaged in debian, cli only. One config file and will run unattended. No dependencies apart from pppd. Lean. This is what I run now. You know what else is lean? The ppp modules: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7428 Sep 28 12:18 ppp_async.ko.xz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4232 Sep 28 12:18 ppp_deflate.ko.xz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 23364 Sep 28 12:18 ppp_generic.ko.xz Maybe you can reconsider and add these to the cloud kernel, please? Thank you, Robert ________________________________________ From: Noah Meyerhans <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 22:04 To: Robert Trebula <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Bug#1150209: Acknowledgement (linux-image-cloud-arm64: please enable CONFIG_PPP=m in the -cloud kernel) The goal of the cloud kernels is to include only drivers and functionality commonly used in a cloud environment. I'm not sure CONFIG_PPP meets these criteria. You can install the standard non-cloud kernel on your instances if you require functionality not available in the cloud kernel. Will that address your use case? noah
