Why can't display all installed kernel with rpm -q

[Paul Howarth]

On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 13:55 +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On 12May2006 22:58, Frank Pineau <frank at pineaus.com> wrote:
> | On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 09:12 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> | > Right.  But, as Rob pointed out, the OP is running the smp kernel.  I
> | > tend to do the grep thingy to remind myself of having the devel packages
> | > loaded as well as other self built kernels.
> | 
> | Well there's an odd thing.  I tried rpm -q kernel on mine to see what
> | happens (I've always done rpm -qa |grep kernel) and it returned my
> | kernels just fine.  Thing is, I'm running SMP x86_64 kernels, but it's
> | only listed as SMP when I do a uname -a.  Am I missing something?
> 
> Well, on my box:
> 
>   [~]#root at zoob*> rpm -qf /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2069_FC4smp
>   kernel-smp-2.6.16-1.2069_FC4
> 
> So I'd say the SMP kernel is a separate package. What does:
> 
>   rpm -q kernel
>   rpm -q kernel-smp
> 
> say?
> 
> Oh, while on the x86_64 subject I discovered that some RHEL boxes I look
> after have both i386 and x86_64 packages installed, and that "rpm -qa"
> is singularly annoying in that case because its default behaviour is
> not to include the architecture. So eg "rpm -qa | grep foo" will often
> list the same name twice and "rpm -ev foo" will refuse to work because
> it matches multiple packages.
> 
> So I now have an "rpmq" script:
> 
>   http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs//css/bin/rpmq
> 
> that sets up the report format string to include the architecture,
> which still gives you package names you can hand to "rpm -e". I found
> this handy when pruning down an install for a production machine.

It's been suggested before that the default query format for rpm should
include the architecture (the epoch might arguably be sensible to
include too); the problem with this is that it would break lots of
existing scripts that depend on the current default output format, and
that's why the change hasn't happened.

Paul.