Crash while upgrading kernel & stable releases

[Vincent Untz]

Le lundi 20 juin 2005 à 12:56 -0700, Matt Zimmerman a écrit :
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 11:12:49AM +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> 
> > I updated one of my Hoary computer yesterday and, unfortunately, it
> > crashed during the upgrade. What was really unfortunate, is that there was
> > a kernel upgrade. And what was even more unfortunate is that the kernel
> > version number was the same as the previous one. So it deleted the old
> > one...
> 
> Can you explain the nature of the failure (what actually happened to your
> computer as a result)?  It isn't obvious that a crash during a kernel
> upgrade would cause a problem, and if it does, it can probably be fixed.

The computer was freezed. Absolutely no activity. I was forced to reboot
(after having waited 30 minutes).
I don't know how reproducable it is, and I'm not sure I want to try to
reproduce ;-) But it happened at least once to me.

When I rebooted, after grub launched linux, there was an error with
something like "bad file". I should have written it down, but I needed
to quickly fix the computer and so I forgot.

> > As you can guess, the result was that the computer was unbootable (and
> > still is ;-)). I know the upgrade contains only security fixes, but I
> > believe the version number should have been incremented, if only to
> > prevent problems like this one. Wouldn't it make sense to adopt this
> > policy?
> 
> Installing every kernel in parallel isn't very workable; at over 50M per
> kernel this would occupy a huge amount of space, and all third-party modules
> added by the user/admin would need to be recompiled with every upgrade.

I understand that it can take a huge amount of disk space. Wouldn't it
be possible to only keep the last two versions of the kernel?

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.