Hi everyone,

Just curious, really, but I have had Fedora 8 install for just over a week now and there have been four kernel updates, requiring an update to the Menu.lst in grub (from another distro on the same HD) and a reboot. Not really a problem, but the grub screen is getting littered with unused Fedora kernels.

Why is the kernel updated so often for Fedora? I run Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS and neither update the kernel so often. I think this edition of Fedora is terrific and I will continue to use it in spite of this minor inconvenience, but is it really necessary to update the kernel so often?

On the same note, I now have three unused kernels and would like to know how to safely delete the ones I will not be using.

Any help appreciated.

Bob

Get a list of all of your installed packages with this command:

rpm -qa | sort | less

Then remove any unneeded kernels with this command:

rpm -e packagename

I don't know if removing the rpm will also delete the grub entry. If it doesn't then edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to remove the unneeded grub entries.

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Steve Stites

Thank you, jailbait. That is the information I needed.

Regards

Bob

That's strange. When I update my Fedora kernel, YUM automatically remove any kernel except the one being updated, and updates the grub.conf file at the same time. (Note that Fedora does not use the older menu.lst for GRUB control.)

As to why Fedora get such frequent kernel updates, I suspect it because Fedora is the Beta test site for Red Hat Linux, and the developers are trying to stay on the cutting (or, perhaps, "bleeding", eh?) edge of everything.

Thanks, PTrenholm. I should have explained that I didn't use Fedora's Grub when I installed. I have the Grub from PCLinuxOX on the MBR and just have an entry for Fedora. Fedora boots much faster for me because I don't use it's default splash screen. Just text to boo until the login screen arrives. I wonder if this fact has anything to do with the fact that Fedora just leaves the old kernels in the boot menu?

Bob

The kernel is partially transient. From time to time it loads and uses a driver module which is part of the kernel. If Fedora (or any distribution) removed the old kernel during an update then you would have problems the next time a module needed to be loaded. So you can't remove the old kernel until you have rebooted into the new kernel.

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Steve Stites

Thanks, jailbait. That makes sense. Anyway, I always record the necessary new kernel information and mount the PCLinuxOS partition make the new entries into grub BEFORE I reboot. Learned my lesson about that years ago. None of this really causes a problem, just a little inconvenience, which, in my opinion, is minor compared to the quality that I think Fedora delivers.

Regards

Bob

The reason Fedora has so many updates is that it is a development distro. By its very nature it is always in flux. This is also why support for any one version is limited to about one year.

The 2.6.23.15 kernel version seems to have disappeared from the repositories, so maybe keeping the old kernel around for a while might be a "good thing" in any case, eh?

Bob, what I do on my multiboot testing PC is to have a symlink in /boot to the kernel and another to initrd, and when an update comes through, I just create new symlinks to the new kernel/initrd. I also have symlinks kernel.old and initrd.old to the previous version in case of problems.

Then change grub to use the symlinks, and you don't ever need to update menu.lst which, I assume, is on anothe partition that isn't usually mounted.

Fedora normally only keeps the two most recent kernels in the repo. So I would agree about hanging onto some older kernels. Yum has a setting somewhere that tells it how many to hang onto (will not apply to OP).

I'm using SuSE 10.3, and there have been a number of kernel "Security" updates in the past two weeks. You probably have noticed the same thing.

Tahnks to everyone for all the responses/comments. I am clear about it now.

Billymayday: your suggestion about the sym link to the new kernels is an interesting one that I will try. Actually, mounting the partition that holds grub is quite easy and when I need to edit it, I just mount it right in Fedora and it has worked just fine.

regards

Bob