Whenever I see the update manager glowing that I have an update I get annoyed and click it, so I'm almost always updating something and usually this has gone fine without any problems...
Recently it told me there was a new kernel update, so I clicked install like I usually do but it just got stuck, for hours. When I examined the terminal output it was hanging on a DKMS installation step, so I grabbed all the active DKMS processes and found that the specific thing it was hanging on was installing something called EVDI (which is related to the DisplayLink Ubuntu driver, I think). After letting it sit there doing nothing for more than a day I killed it and had to Timeshift back to before I had done the installation as it corrupted my kernel.
I examined the log file in /var/lib/dkms/evdi/5.2.14/build/make.log and found that it has many errors reported, and the one that starts the chain is:
make -f ./scripts/Makefile.build obj=scripts
make[1]: *** [arch/x86/Makefile:211: archscripts] Error 2
I can provide the full log file if you want, it's just long.
I've tried to google around this and haven't been able to find anyone with this specific issue, so any help is much appreciated! I have also tried installing the DisplayLink driver from source (since it includes an install of EVDI) but it also hangs in the same place (for hours) -- it gets stuck at [[ Installing EVDI DKMS module ]].
I've thought about straight up removing all references to EVDI and hoping that it would then rebuild it, but I am not sure if this would cause further problems. In a different answer I saw that I could remove all DKMS instances of a package from all kernels by doing something like sudo dkms remove package --all but this is entirely new territory for me and I have decided I should wait for someone smarter than me to tell me whether that's a good idea or not before I end up irreparably breaking my installation.
I'm running Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon (Cinnamon v 4.8.6), Linux kernel 5.8.0-44-generic, on a Dell XPS 13 with an i7-1065G7 CPU (no GPU). Everything does work fine right now, I just would like to not be stuck on this version of the Linux kernel forever! Any help is very much appreciated :)
Ultimately fixed by booting into an old 5.4 kernel, purging DKMS + all of the 5.8 kernels and a troublesome 5.4 kernel (had to do some things by hand as apt would not remove some directories), then reinstalling everything and updating grub from the 5.4 kernel. Just tested an update via the update manager (now running on the latest 5.8 kernel) and it worked fine! Unclear what exactly was causing the problem but glad it's fixed and hope this helps others if they stumble into something like this.