On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 08:48:14PM +0100, Tom wrote:
Mantaining multiple kernels would only add overhead on developers' work, and bloating /boot.
I don't really get that. I'm no expert in using pacman or writing PKGBUILDs, but I can very readily imagine a mechanism that on each rolling release update to the kernel, moves the current kernel on the users system to say 'kernel-previous', and puts the update in place for 'kernel'. Add a line to grub to reflect the two kernel-versions (current and previous) and handle this with symlinks so that the actual kernel + libs and so on can have version names.
That's what happens in Fedora when e.g. you install the RT-patched kernel from the CCARMA audio packages, and AFAIK also (but I never did this) when you update the Fedora provided kernel. It can occasionally save your system. On Arch you of course always have the 'fallback' boot option (which can be expected to work), or you can boot from the original netinstall CD. But it's by no means clear to me how you could 'rewind' a failed kernel update using either of these. -- FA O tu, che porte, correndo si ? E guerra e morte !