FC3 upgrade warning: unbootable system may result

[Vladimir G. Ivanovic]

The FC3 upgrade deletes all previous kernels that had been installed
with RPMs. That's might not cause a problem if the new kernel then
boots, but in my case, it did not. I suspect that a fair number of
people would be hosed at this point.

Fortunately I had built and installed a kernel, so that one was still
available and bootable.

The problem is that the kernel postinstall script can't find the
sym53c8xx_2 loadable module for (in my case) a Symbios/LSI Logic
53c1010 Ultra3 SCSI Adapter. The driver is *in* a directory called
sym53c8xx_2 and its name is sym53c8xx.ko. The new-kernel-pkg script
(actually, /sbin/mkinitrd that's called from new-kernel-pkg) of the
RPM expects the module to be called sym53c8xx_2.ko and be in the same
directory as the other SCSI drivers. 

The fix was simple: Rename the driver. I was then able to re-run the
postinstall script without errors.

Two comments. (1) I think it is wrong, wrong, wrong for an upgrade to
delete any existing kernel unless explicit permission is given by the
user. Up2date, for instance, will not remove packages that appear in
the removeSkipList. (2) Obviously no one tested the upgrade on any
system that used a Symbios/LSI Logic SCSI driver. I noticed that the
kernel sources also suffer from this problem, which is not surprising
since the upgrade kernel was built from those sources.

--- Vladimir

-- 
Vladimir G. Ivanovic                      http://leonora.org/~vladimir
Palo Alto, CA 94306                                    +1 650 678 8014