I filed and fixed the following ticket in the upcoming MariaDB 10.3.13 release: https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-18399 MDEV-18399 Recognize the deprecated parameters innodb_file_format, innodb_large_prefix
The parameter innodb_default_row_format has not been deprecated nor removed. It was introduced in MariaDB 10.2 and later backported to 10.1. The backward-compatible default value innodb_default_row_format=compact in 10.1 was overridden by the Debian-shipped configuration file. The default value since 10.2 is innodb_default_row_format=dynamic. -- Marko Mäkelä, Lead Developer InnoDB MariaDB Corporation