This is all from the POV of a person who just installs Ubuntu and expects it to work. So yes. I meant major releases of the distro and I assumed they weren’t going to fuss with backports.
I figured modules that already exist in the kernel would be updated, but I’ve seen new modules added in later versions of the kernel. And since distro releases seem to stick with a specific kernel version, you would need to completely update your distro to get that support.
Genuinely curious since I haven’t used Debian-based distros in a while, I always thought new modules are installed via the linux-kernel package. Are kernel modules installed separately?