We should now be ready to actually upgrade the kernel rpm's and related packages. You will need to be logged in as root to execute all of these commands.
First, I will upgrade the non-kernel packages. On a 5.2 system, you would type something similar to
rpm -Uvh mkinitrd*rpm SysVinit*rpm initscripts*rpm
Note:Unless you do development work, you do not need to install or upgrade these packages.
Next you should upgrade the kernel-headers and kernel-source packages. These packages take up a lot of room, and unless you are a deep kernel hacker, you probably do not need multiple copies of the source around.
# rpm -Uvh kernel-headers-2.0.36-1.i386.rpm kernel-source-2.0.36-1.i386.rpm
kernel-headers ##################################################
kernel-source ##################################################
If you recieve errors when upgrading the kernel-headers file it is due to the fact it couldn't find a directory to remove but everything else should work ok.
The final task to do with RPM is to install the new kernels. We do an install instead of an upgrade as an added safety step. By not removing the old kernel and modules, you should be able to boot back into the old version if you need to. Again on my example 5.2 machine,
# rpm -ivh kernel-2.0.36-1.i386.rpm kernel-ibcs-2.0.36-1.i386.rpm kernel-pcmcia-cs-2.0.36-1.i386.rpm
kernel ##################################################
kernel-ibcs ##################################################
kernel-pcmcia-cs ##################################################
You may find out that there are conflicts between the old
and new kernel-pcmcia packages. To get around this
error you can either force the install, or upgrade the
package (Note: You can't use the old kernel with
PCMCIA if you upgrade the package.)
# rpm -ivh --force kernel-pcmcia-cs-2.0.36-1.i386.rpm
kernel-pcmcia-cs ##################################################
The final steps of the upgrade are to make the initial ram disk
for your machine, and to manipulate LILO to boot the new kernel.
These steps will require you to edit the /etc/lilo.conf
file.
The purpose of the initial ram disk is to allow a modular kernel to have access to modules that it might need to boot from before the kernel has access to the device where the modules normally reside. Thus, you end up with a chicken and egg problem, where you need a driver to talk to the hardware where the driver resides on. This problem normally occurs on systems with SCSI controllers.
To make this ramdisk, you will first need to find out what the
kernel in /boot is called and then using the
mkinitrd command.
To find out what the kernel we need to link against, we will list
the /boot directory, and look for what kernels are
installed. The Red Hat kernel RPM install should create a
symbolic link from the file /boot/vmlinuz to the kernel
that it installed.
# ls -l /boot/vmlinuz*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Dec 2 18:31 /boot/vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-2.0.36-1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 454325 Oct 13 22:41 /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-0.7
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 454349 Nov 17 13:11 /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-1
In the above example, the kernel is
/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-1 and we can feed this data to the
mkinitrd command.
# mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.0.36.img 2.0.36-1
# ls -l /boot/initrd-2.0.36*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 210885 Nov 20 09:57 /boot/initrd-2.0.36-0.7.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 212043 Dec 2 18:47 /boot/initrd-2.0.36.img
We have successfully created the initial ram disk called
/boot/initrd-2.0.36.img, and can proceed to editing the
LILO files.
The last step before rebooting your machine should be editing LILO to find the new kernel images. This is fairly simple by adding an entry that follows this template:
image=/boot/vmlinuz-<kernel version goes here>
label=linux-test
root=<your root (/) partition goes here
initrd=/boot/initrd-<kernel version goes here>
read-only
On my example 5.2 machine, I made the following changes to the
/etc/lilo.conf file.
# cat /etc/lilo.conf
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-1
label=linux
root=/dev/hda9
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.0.36.img
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-0.7
label=linux.old
root=/dev/hda9
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.0.36-0.7.img
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label=dos
table=/dev/hda
What this did was make the "default" boot kernel the new one I
installed, and I renamed the option for booting the old kernel to
be linux.old. On my system the root partition is
/dev/hda9 but this will most likely different on your
machine.
Finally, you will need to run the lilo command to write
these changes to the boot sector LILO is installed on.
# lilo -v
LILO version 20, Copyright 1992-1997 Werner Almesberger
Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
Merging with /boot/boot.b
Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-1
Mapping RAM disk /boot/initrd-2.0.36.img
Added linux *
Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-0.7
Mapping RAM disk /boot/initrd-2.0.36-0.7.img
Added linux.old
Boot other: /dev/hda1, on /dev/hda, loader /boot/chain.b
Added dos
/boot/boot.0300 exists - no backup copy made.
Writing boot sector.
You should be ready to reboot your machine with shutdown -r
now and the system will come up with the new
kernel. Remember to remove the rescue floppy from the drive
(which is what I forgot to do when writing this article).