$nrconf{kernelfilter} = qr(vmlinuz-.*-v8$);

Raspbian and other linux distros are installing multiple kernel images in parallel:

• kernel.img
• kernel7.img
• kernel7l.img
• kernel8.img

This might result in a continuous pending kernel update false positive. There is a configuration option in needrestart to filter the kernel image filenames to ignore the unused image files.

RPi 1 or RPi 1B

$ cat << 'EOF' > /etc/needrestart/conf.d/kernel.conf
# Filter kernel image filenames by regex. This is required on Raspian having
# multiple kernel image variants installed in parallel.
$nrconf{kernelfilter} = qr(vmlinuz-.*-v6$);
EOF

RPi 2 or RPi 3

$ cat << 'EOF' > /etc/needrestart/conf.d/kernel.conf
# Filter kernel image filenames by regex. This is required on Raspian having
# multiple kernel image variants installed in parallel.
$nrconf{kernelfilter} = qr(vmlinuz-.*-v7$);
EOF

RPi 5

RPi 5 has the ability to switch between 16KB and 4KB page size kernels. Run uname -r to get the currently used kernel. By default, it should be 6.1.0-rpi8-rpi-2712 (16KB page size).

$ cat << 'EOF' > /etc/needrestart/conf.d/kernel.conf
# Filter kernel image filenames by regex. This is required on Raspian having
# multiple kernel image variants installed in parallel.
# 6.1.0-rpi8-rpi-v8 (4KB page size)
# $nrconf{kernelfilter} = qr(vmlinuz-.*-v8$);
# 6.1.0-rpi8-rpi-2712 (16KB page size)
$nrconf{kernelfilter} = qr(vmlinuz-.*-2712$);
EOF