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Upgrade

Upgrading Falco on a Linux system

This section provides upgrading paths for Falco if previously installed following the Install section.

If you are using the kernel module, please remove it with root priviliges before upgrading Falco to avoid issues during the upgrade.

rmmod falco

When utilizing the traditional BPF driver, there is no requirement for explicit removal. Instead, the corresponding .o object file is simply overridden during the upgrade process.

With modern BPF, updating Falco is as simple as upgrading the package or replacing the binary, as the driver is bundled within the Falco binary.

Falco packages

Here there are no specific steps to follow, you just need to type the specific commands for your distro. Please remember to specify the FALCO_FRONTEND=noninteractive env variable if you don't want to use the dialog during the upgrade

Debian/Ubuntu

If you configured the apt repository by having followed the instructions for Falco 0.27.0 or older, you may need to update the repository URL, otherwise, fell free to ignore this message

sed -i 's,https://dl.bintray.com/falcosecurity/deb,https://download.falco.org/packages/deb,' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/falcosecurity.list
apt-get clean
apt-get -y update

Check in the apt-get update log that https://download.falco.org/packages/deb is present.

If you installed Falco by following the provided instructions:

apt-get --only-upgrade install falco

CentOS/RHEL/Fedora/Amazon Linux

If you configured the yum repository by having followed the instructions for Falco 0.27.0 or older, you may need to update the repository URL, otherwise, fell free to ignore this message

sed -i 's,https://dl.bintray.com/falcosecurity/rpm,https://download.falco.org/packages/rpm,' /etc/yum.repos.d/falcosecurity.repo
yum clean all

Then check that the falcosecurity-rpm repository is pointing to https://download.falco.org/packages/rpm/:

yum repolist -v falcosecurity-rpm

If you installed Falco by following the provided instructions:

  1. Check for updates:

    yum check-update

  2. If a newer Falco version is available:

    yum update falco

openSUSE

If you configured the zypper repository by having followed the instructions for Falco 0.27.0 or older, you may need to update the repository URL, otherwise, fell free to ignore this message

sed -i 's,https://dl.bintray.com/falcosecurity/rpm,https://download.falco.org/packages/rpm,' /etc/zypp/repos.d/falcosecurity.repo
zypper refresh

Then check that the falcosecurity-rpm repository is pointing to https://download.falco.org/packages/rpm/:

zypper lr falcosecurity-rpm

If you installed Falco by following the provided instructions:

zypper update falco

Falco binary

For the Falco binary we don't provide specific update paths, you just have to remove files installed by the old tar.gz and download the new version of Falco as described here

Special Note on Kernel Drivers and Kernel Upgrades

When performing kernel upgrades on your host, a reboot is required. Consequently, the Falco binary restarts, and additionally, you must ensure that a new kernel driver corresponding to the updated kernel release (uname -r) is available when using the kernel module or traditional BPF driver. By using Falco's falco-driver-loader, these processes are automated for you, making it easy to handle kernel upgrades. The Falco Project features a kernel crawler and automated CI, ensuring you can always obtain the necessary pre-built driver artifact, even for the latest kernel releases we support.

The great news is that modern BPF driver is more resilient to it, because of the CO-RE "Compile Once - Run Everywhere" feature that made it possible to bundle the driver into the Falco binary - it will just continue to work on the upgraded kernel. If possible, use modern BPF!