Kernel Upgrade

[assassin85]

hi,

i want to know what the correct steps to upgrade kernel with os Centos 4 , Fedora 4

thanks

[jandafields]

Keep in mind that you should have an emergency plan in place, since upgrading your kernel could EASILY break your box.

The "basic" way:
yum upgrade kernel

The "advanced" way:
compile kernel from sources, customizing it like you want

Read up on kernel.org and linuxquestions.org.

[Tam]

hi,

i want to know what the correct steps to upgrade kernel with os Centos 4 , Fedora 4

thanks

If you are not running a customer kernel (if you don't know the answer its probably no), then running yum -y update is good, however if you have experiences like most of us and find that kernel updates panic and wont boot, then you need to put in a failsafe to fall back to the old or previously working kernel to save you having to wait for someone to reboot at the datacentre or via KVM, so ...

Run ...

yum -y update

before rebooting, edit grub.conf and add ...

panic=5

to the end of the kernel version lines, i.e....

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You do not have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda1
#          initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-53.1.4.el5)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ panic=5
	initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5.img
title CentOS (2.6.18-8.el5)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ panic=5
	initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-8.el5.img

Then run this command from SSH as root...

echo "savedefault --default=1 --once" | grub --batch

Then reboot.

This will force a reboot on the next kernel version in the list if the latest one panics and fails to load. And then you can remove the update that failed to boot...

yum remove kernel-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5

obviously use the correct version number in the above example.

And then you will want to exclude that version from subsequent updates when using yum, so add an exclude in your yum.conf [MAIN] section...

exclude=kernel-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5

again, obviously using the correct version number in the example above.

[Tam]

I neglected to mention ...

If you have Fantastico installed and have rolled back the wget version as Fantastico requests, you will need to exclude it in your yum.conf to prevent an error during yum update. So, add an exclude in the [MAIN] section of yum.conf for wget, i.e. ...

exclude=apache* courier* exim* httpd* mod_ssl* mysql* perl* php* proftpd* pure-ftpd* spamassassin* squirrelmail* wget*

note that in this example the wget exclude is added onto the end of the existing exclude line