[arch-general] Getting freeze on early start with linux 4.9-1 kernel.

[Eli Schwartz]

On 12/24/2016 10:33 AM, Mauro Santos via arch-general wrote:
> What other distros do is recommend a 1GB /boot or changing the
> configuration to reduce the number of older kernels installed[1]. People
> have complained about small libraries needing to be installed as being
> wasteful, at a grand total 100MiB+ for each kernel that would start a
> nice flamewar.

Well, we already expect people to take care of orphans themselves, and
nobody is suggesting old kernels *must* be kept around forever.

>>> There is also the matter of automagic bootloader configuration change to
>>> support that, not to mention people that use efistub to boot their
>>> system, how do you propose to handle that?

The blatantly obvious way would be with a dummy kernel package
containing a symlink to the vmlinuz/initramfs of the latest versioned
package. Old bootloader configurations don't care about how many new and
irrelevant files aren't being looked at.

If you want new bootloader entries to be automatically added in grub.cfg
then simply use a pacman hook to re-run grub-mkconfig -- I am sure
something similar can be easily done for syslinux/EFI.
You can also edit the boot cmdline from grub itself...

>> If you have installed archlinux, it's reasonable to expect that one knows
>> how to configure this.
> 
> It is you who said "I wish arch would (like other distros) keep 2 or
> three old kernel versions around" not me. Other distributions
> automagically take care of updating the bootloader configuration, as
> much would be expected of arch.
> Some people already have trouble managing to update one kernel properly,
> imagine the chaos it would be with more than one if manual steps were
> involved, not to mention old kernels have _known_ security issues and
> having old stuff around is not the Arch way.

What problems are people having with updating one kernel? Please
elaborate on your vagueness.

As for known security issues and keeping old stuff around, I could care
less about offering all kernels in the repos -- I just don't want my old
kernel to be uninstalled until I say so.

See http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 for more details, but the basic
gist is that versioned kernel installs are a *good* thing, as opposed to
being forced to reboot every time your --sysupgrade includes the kernel
(which is what *I* would call not-very-Arch-way), and it is intended
that we will eventually get versioned kernels, and the fact that we
don't have that today is simply because it is low-priority and tpowa
hasn't gotten around to it yet.

(I am not entirely sure what the holdup is, though.)

-- 
Eli Schwartz

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