On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Jud Craft <craftjml@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Don't get me wrong, I think they should definitely fix it (the > kernel-update-path problem), but the kernel-update-path problem is > causing difficulties for other distributions who install over Fedora, > not for Fedora installing over someone else. It's a separate problem. > > Unless all distributions do the tons-of-different-kernel-updates in > GRUB thing. I thought Fedora was the only one that did that. When Fedora updates a kernel.. a new grub entry is added for the new kernel and that grub entry is set to be the default. Older kernel entries are automatically removed so that you have only 2 kernel entries at a time. A current and a fallback. This is the default configuration which can be tweaked with some config setting changes. Now at install time of another linux operating system...they might be able to capture the current state of your existing Fedora install by gobbling up the grub entries. But once you have installed two update kernels for that Fedora install...the boot loader from the other linux install will no longer point to valid Fedora kernel images. If the other linux installs its own seperate boot loader instance with seperate configs...and only imports the Fedora boot loader configs at OS install time... this will eventually break and the Fedora system will not boot. The other linux system installed after installing Fedora will have to constantly monitor for changes in Fedora's bootloader as Fedora's kernel is updated. In fact this is an unsolvable situation. Any time the linux operating systems are not sharing a common grub config, operates which modify the grub config while booted into a linux system...like updating the kernel unless will cause the other grub config to become out of sync as long as the kernel images are versioned. Fedora provides a symlink that always points to the current kernel and initrd images as configured in its own boot configuration like thorsten has described. Even then its not perfect because there is no way to statically inform another bootloader of the cmdline options that might be new with a new update kernel...but thats a corner case. Ubuntu and OpenSuse need to stop doing what they are doing and blacklist Fedora. What they are doing guarantees that Fedora will be unbootable from their bootloader once the Fedora system has seen 2+ kernel updates. -jef -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
