olpc-dev-kernel and yum update

[Daniel Drake]

On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 8:48 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>
> This isn't a bug report, just an observation to keep anyone else from
> spending time on this known condition (cjb's comment was "of course!"):
>
> If you want to update a kernel on a 13.1.0/13.2.0 build, you must first
> run olpc-dev-kernel.   Running it after doing the yum update kernel
> will result in a confused system, which cannot be fixed using yum alone.

Just retested:

If you want to update a kernel to a newer official kernel from the
repos, "yum update" and reboot is enough. No need to run
olpc-dev-kernel at any point.

If you want to run a custom kernel, you need to ensure that an
unzipped initramfs is available on disk. One way to achieve this is to
install/upgrade a kernel RPM, another way is to run olpc-dev-kernel.

Running "yum update" to retrieve a new kernel, then rebooting, and
running "olpc-dev-kernel" (for which there is no reason) and rebooting
again, left me with a usable system (albeit running from the kernel
originally shipped in the build).

I suspect in this case you didn't mean to run olpc-dev-kernel (since
yum update had already done the equivalent, allowing you to boot your
own custom kernel with no further steps) and indeed this was an
unintentional behaviour change on top of an earlier version. I might
tweak the behaviour next time I'm working in that area.

Daniel