Crash while upgrading kernel & stable releases

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 08:33:23AM +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:

> Le lundi 20 juin 2005 à 12:56 -0700, Matt Zimmerman a écrit :
> > 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.

I'm sorry, but this isn't enough information to diagnose the problem.  If
you can reproduce it, then perhaps we can track down the cause and fix it.

> > 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?

It is certainly possible, but currently there exists no support in the
package management system for this kind of thing.

(read: it could require extensive infrastructure work)

-- 
 - mdz