Sonntag, 11. November 2007

Problems updating kernels and kmods

I announced in on fedora-list@redhat.com and freeworld@livna.org already, but seems a lot of people ran into the problem and missed my post, so I put a slightly enhanced version of my post here as well:
F8 users with kmods will run into problems when updating to the
latest kernel from Fedora due to a problem in yum from F8 (at least
it looks like a bug in yum to me atm). See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=330711
for details. The problem looks like this:

# yum update
Setting up Update Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package kernel.i686 0:2.6.23.1-49.fc8 set to be updated
---> Package kmod-nvidia-96xx.i686 0:96.43.01-17.lvn8 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: kmod-nvidia-96xx-2.6.23.1-49.fc8 for package: kmod-nvidia-96xx
--> Processing Dependency: kernel-i686 = 2.6.23.1-42.fc8 for package: kmod-nvidia-96xx-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
--> Running transaction check
---> Package kmod-nvidia-96xx-2.6.23.1-49.fc8.i686 0:96.43.01-17.lvn8 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: kernel-i686 = 2.6.23.1-42.fc8 for package: kmod-nvidia-96xx-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

If you run into this problem you can uninstall the kernel-modules for
the current kernel with this command :

rpm -e --nodeps $(rpm -qa 'kmod-*2.6.23*')

as workaround and then run yum update; you should get the new kernel and
the new kmods for it when running "yum update" afterwards.
Sorry for the trouble. Note that we have seem other problem in F7 due to this problem in the past already as well. According to a comment in above bug report it looks like other kernel module packaging standards might be affected as well.

While at it: looks like there is another bug in yum that affects kmods. In some situations the i586 kmod gets chosen to install, which tracks in the i586 kernel, which then leads to an error, as that has file conflicts with the i686 kernel. This is tracked in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=346371
You can work around the problem by specifying which arch to install by running "yum install kmod-foo.i686".

2 Kommentare:

Anonym hat gesagt…

Hi Thorsten,

just an idea: Could it be that this is rather a problem of the kmod-nvidia package(s) than a yum bug? To be exact, a non-processed dependency of the kmod-nvidia meta package which depends on the respective kmod-nvidia-'uname -r' package. I haven't checked, but it may be possible that the dependency is not correctly listed in the kmod-nvidia rpm.

Thorsten Leemhuis hat gesagt…

> Could it be that this is rather a problem
> of the kmod-nvidia package(s) than a yum
> bug?

Maybe the kmod stuff has some still not-known bugs here and there, but this is definitely a bug in yum that was fixed in between:

http://thorstenl.blogspot.com/2007/12/problems-updating-kernels-and-kmods-2.html