Before upgrading the kernel, take a few precautionary steps. If the system has a diskette drive, the first
step is to make sure a working boot diskette exists for the system in case a problem occurs. If the boot
loader is not configured properly to boot the new kernel, the system cannot be booted into Red Hat
Enterprise Linux without a working boot diskette.
To create the boot diskette, login as root, and type the following command at a shell prompt:
/sbin/mkbootdisk `uname -r`
Tip: Refer to the man page for
mkbootdisk for more options. Kernels that are too large for a boot floppy disk can be put onto a CD with the
--iso option for
mkbootdisk.
Reboot the machine with the boot diskette and verify that it works before continuing.
Hopefully, the diskette will not be needed, but store it in a safe place just in case.
To determine which kernel packages are installed, execute the following command at a shell prompt:
rpm -qa | grep kernel
The output contains some or all of the following packages, depending on the system's architecture
(the version numbers and packages may differ):
kernel-2.4.21-1.1931.2.399.ent
kernel-source-2.4.21-1.1931.2.399.ent
kernel-utils-2.4.21-1.1931.2.399.ent
kernel-pcmcia-cs-3.1.31-13
kernel-smp-2.4.21-1.1931.2.399.ent
|
From the output, determine which packages need to be downloaded for the kernel upgrade. For a single processor system, the only required package is the
kernel package.
In the filename, each kernel package contains the architecture for which the package was built. The
format is kernel-<
variant>-<
version>.<
arch>.rpm, where
<
variant>
is
smp,
utils,
etc. The
<
arch>
is one of the following:
- x86_64 for the AMD64 architecture.
- ia64 for the Intel® Itanium™ architecture
- ppc64pseries for the IBM® eServer™ pSeries™ architecture
- ppc64iseries for the IBM® eServer™ iSeries™ architecture
- s390 for the IBM® S/390® architecture
- s390x for the IBM® eServer™ zSeries® architecture
- x86 variant: The x86 kernels are optimized for different x86 versions. The options are as follows:
- athlon for AMD Athlon® and AMD Duron® systems
- i686 for Intel® Pentium® II, Intel® Pentium® III, Intel® Pentium® 4, and Intel® Xeon® systems
