removing old Kernels

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 01:25 +0300, Kostas Sfakiotakis wrote:
> Greetings Jim,
> 
> Jim Cornette wrote:
> > Kostas Sfakiotakis wrote:
> >> Greetings Brian ,
> 
> < snip >
> 
> > Is it possible to run make rpm and get a compiled version of the kernel? 
> 
> I will fail you on that . All i can suggest is this . Get the 
> kernel-source-version.rpm . This is essentially the "rpm version of the
> tarball" . Then run rpmbuild --rebuild and make the kernel rpm .

There hasn't been a kernel-source RPM in Fedora for quite a while now;
the kernel has a regular SRPM just like every other package.

It's possible to tweak this SRPM if you want to build a custom kernel
RPM:
http://www.city-fan.org/tips/TweakKernelPackage

> > I have not compiled a kernel in awhile. I seem to recall doing this on 
> > the vanilla kernel source. After you compile the rpm, you could remove
> > it with the usual rpm -e  <kernel-custom> command.
> > 
> > You could try make rpm.
> 
> No rule to make target rpm . Do you by any chance mean ,
> rpmbuild ? rpmbuild will fail because the top level directory doesn't 
> have the spec file needed to do the job .
> 
> Anyway what do i have to loose if i just go ahead without using
> an rpm and compile the kernel the old fashioned way . I don't understand 
> the problem to the stability of the system if the rpmdatabase isn't 
> aware of the kernel being running.

If you manually remove files that are "owned" by an RPM then your system
will be in an inconsistent state; if you use RPM (or yum) to install
something then you should use RPM (or yum) to remove it.

If you have built and installed your kernel manually then you should
remove it manually (but don't forget that most of the kernel lives
under /lib/modules rather than in /boot).

If you are running a custom kernel that RPM does not know about then you
may have some dependency issues with userland tools such as systemtap
that have dependencies or conflicts with specific kernel versions.

Paul.