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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0009231Kali LinuxKali Package Bugpublic2025-06-25 02:40
Reporterkilldash9 Assigned Toarnaudr  
PrioritynormalSeverityminorReproducibilityhave not tried
Status closedResolutionwon't fix 
Summary0009231: Osinfo-db in kali-rolling provides outdated database
Description

Hi everyone, this is my first post here so I just wanted to introduce myself, I'm killdash9, I've been working on creating a Mac VM, and ran into this issue, the osinfo-db in the kali-rolling repo seems to be providing extremely outdated database info, most current I saw was 10.7 Lion, so 2011~?
This prevents tools relying on libosinfo such as virt-install from being able to correctly use the --os-variant flag for modern OSs, for example, attempting to use a variant for macOS Monterey fails, forcing the generic fallback (--osinfodetect=on,require=off) which is of course less than optimized.

I confirmed this on a fully updated kali-rolling system. The reproduce steps are:

  1. Ensure the system is up to date and package cache is cleared.
    sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* && sudo apt update

  2. Install the package
    sudo apt install -y osinfo-db

Query the DB for macOS profiles
osinfo-query os | grep -i Mac

Thanks for reading.

Activities

arnaudr

arnaudr

2025-06-25 02:40

manager   ~0020709

You can check the version of the package:

┌──(root㉿t14)-[/work]
└─# apt show osinfo-db
Package: osinfo-db
Version: 0.20250124-1

It's from January 2025, not exactly latest, but not from 2011 either.

We get this package from Debian, I noticed that in Debian unstable there is a newer version 0.20250606-1. When this package moves from Debian unstable to Debian testing, it will naturally enter Kali as well (as Kali is based on Debian testing).

This being said, I doubt it will solve your problem, I don't think there will be any significant changes between the two versions.

Maybe check upstream, eg. this issue: https://gitlab.com/libosinfo/osinfo-db/-/issues/113 ?

I'm closing the ticket as this is not an issue in Kali itself, in this case you should see with upstream directly.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2025-06-24 21:11 killdash9 New Issue
2025-06-25 02:40 arnaudr Note Added: 0020709
2025-06-25 02:40 arnaudr Assigned To => arnaudr
2025-06-25 02:40 arnaudr Status new => closed
2025-06-25 02:40 arnaudr Resolution open => won't fix