cPanel Upgrading Kernel, why?

I've just checked this on some of our servers and it's certainly not happening for us. The kernel is not in the yum exclusion list as default anyway however is definitely not upgraded by upcp. This didn't happen on any of our 11.36 upgrades either. What do your logs show for the upgrade?

 

I can confirm this, as a recent security update to the kernel was not installed by CPanel and needed to be applied, even using YUM, by myself manually. Conversations with CPanel staff confirm there should be no forced kernel updates during CPanel's automatic maintenance. Best I can think of is when YUM is told to install something else, that package is pulling the latest kernel in as a dependency, but without further info that's the absolute best I can offer as an explanation.

 

I don't have specifics, but I believe the YUM update command given during the update process is designed to exclude kernel updates. Again, this is based on my own issues with the expectation of the opposite result, so my guess is something else pulled in by a YUM update is requiring that version of the kernel as a dependency. Although you're right--CPanel shouldn't be modifying your yum.conf, but I'm wondering if the YUM update would fail on its own due to that dependency issue.