Fedora Users — Re: Disappearing Kernels during Yum update

On 09/04/2009 01:04 AM, Kam Leo wrote:

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 9:48 PM, Steven F. LeBrun<steven@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Over the past few weeks there have been kernel updates for Fedora 11.

When my system receives updates, usually using yumex, and a new kernel is
installed, the oldest kernel in my /boot directory is deleted automatically
and any "title" commands in /boot/grub/grub.conf referring to those kernels
is also removed.  There are only three kernels at a time in my /boot
directory.

So far this has not been a problem, though I almost lost some special
settings in my grub.conf file when old kernels were removed.

My questions:

What controls how many kernels, vmlinuz and associated files, are kept in
the /boot directory?

Is there any way to change this to save a different number of kernels or
insure that a specific kernel is not automatically removed from your system?

--
  Steven F. LeBrun

Your request is showing a troubling trend among posters on this list.
Many do not make use of the fabulous search engines provided by the
likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google.

The other trend is that many do not bother to look at installed documentation.

Please do a "man yum.conf" and "man yum" to learn about the most
important utility in your toolbox. Then edit /etc/yum.conf and change
the value for "installonly_limit"

I apologize for not reading all the manpages before posting. I did not suspect that the issue was with yum itself since I had not made any explicit configuration changes to it in over a year and three versions of Fedora. My assumption was that it was a grub or rpm issue or possibly a kernel configuration issue and the man pages for these did not show any indication for the change in behavior.

This brings up another question, why is installonly_limit set to 3 in my yum.conf file when the manpage for yum.conf states that the default is 0 (disable). As I stated above, I have not changed any settings in yum.conf.

This indicates that there is a discrepancy between the manpages and the actual behavior.

After reading your response to my post, I did another Google search on this issue. Even after adding the keyword yum to my search, I did not come up with a single hit that mentioned that yum did the deletion of the older kernels or of the installonly_limit parameter in yum.conf. I humbly ask what key words you would have used in your search for this information, especially assuming that you did not suspect yum in the first place?

BTW. All the Google hits that I read that included yum as a keyword were asking or responding to how to manually remove older kernels after yum installed a newer kernel.

Steven F. LeBrun

Quote: "The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."
-- G.K. Chesterton

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