During early boot you can get kexec to load it as a panic kernel, but by then its too late I would have though. 2009/9/25 Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com>:

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 11:31 AM, David C. Rankin <drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:

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Guys,

I'm curious. Since there is now an LTS kernel, has anyone thought about adding a few lines of code to the Arch boot process that would provide for automatic failover to the LTS kernel in the event the normal kernel failed to load during the boot process. The thought is to provide redundancy for servers in the case where the regular kernel becomes corrupt (for whatever reason, disk problem, etc...) and a reboot is forced (exhausted UPS, etc..)

I don't know what it would take or if it is doable. I had just envisioned adding a trap that catches the failure of the regular kernel to boot, checks for the presence of the LTS kernel, and if installed boots the LTS kernel in this case.

I haven't looked deep enough into the Arch boot process to know if it is feasible, but it just seemed like a good bit of extra protection that Arch could provide for server installs where the server operates on the regular kernel but also has LTS installed as a backup.

I'll leave it to the gurus to consider. If it's not doable or not worth doing, then just consider it another of my stray thoughts worthy of the DEL key ;-)

You can't do something like this beyond the bootloader. Once anything has started at boot, you have chosen a kernel and cannot go back.

I think, however, grub has something to do this