On 12 Oct 2005 I reported in a message (Subject: FC4 post-yum message "Kernel panic -- not syncing: Attempted to k ill init!") that yum was crashing my FC4 load to the point it wouldn't boot. Today, I finally tracked down the fact that when yum retrieves a kernel update (2.6.11 to 2.6.13) for i686, the kernel won't survive a reboot. It will continue to run after yum is finished, but a reboot causes the message reported above. At first I thought that it might be related to the SElinux update. I yummed that first, but SElinux was not the problem. Then I tried to yum everything but the kernel updates, but my --exclude didn't work, and it only updated the kernel. yum retrieved kernel-devel-i686 and kernel-i686, and after the update, everything ran fine until I rebooted -- of course which failed with the same message. First question is related to the i686 verses i386 designations. All of the other packages yum reported needed to be updated displayed a '.386' designation. Only the two kernel updates displayed the '.686' designaton. Did yum retrieve the wrong kernel update? If so, why? If not, then the next question is: should I allow yum to update the kernel, or should that be done via another method? Last question (I know I shouldn't ask more than one question in a post), what is the proper yum command line to exclude the two kernel updates? I want to yum everything but the kernel. Dave McGuffey Principal Information System Security Engineer SAIC, Columbia, MD
