Bug 175542

This is a yum, not an rpm, problem.

what's in /etc/rpm/platform?

and was this hd installed on one system and moved to another?

$ cat /etc/rpm/platform
athlon-redhat-linux

> was this hd installed on one system and moved to another?

No - native installation.

please send the output of:
yum list installed kernel\*


thanks

$ sudo yum list installed kernel\*
Installed Packages
kernel.i586                              2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-devel.i586                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-doc.noarch                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-smp.i686                          2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed

yum installed the i586 kernel.  I installed the i586 kernel-devel by hand.  yum
also always installs the smp kernels, even though I don't have an smp machine.

I don't think this was the configuration last time I upgraded.  When I tried
installing the i686 kernel by hand, rpm erased a number of installed kernels
which had accumulted from upgrades.  Fortunately, there was one custom kernel
left, or I wouldn't have been able to boot the machine when the i686 kernel
would not work.

at this point I'm not sure of the history of how your system got to where it is.
With all the manual interventions, etc it's hard to tell what you're trying to get.



first things first:

yum remove kernel-smp

then run yum update kernel

and see if it gets the new kernel correct.

$ sudo yum list installed kernel\*
Installed Packages
kernel.i586                              2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-devel.i586                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-doc.noarch                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-smp.i686                          2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed

$ sudo rpm -e kernel-smp

$ sudo yum list installed kernel\*
Installed Packages
kernel.i586                              2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-devel.i586                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-doc.noarch                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed

$ sudo yum -y update kernel
...
Installed: kernel.i586 0:2.6.14-1.1653_FC4

$ sudo yum list installed kernel\*
Installed Packages
kernel.i586                              2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel.i586                              2.6.14-1.1653_FC4      installed
kernel-devel.i586                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed
kernel-doc.noarch                        2.6.14-1.1644_FC4      installed

In this case, yum has failed to find any dependency with kernel-devel.i586 or
with kernel-doc.noarch.  I will have to install these manually or run yum again
to explicitly load kernel-devel and kernel-doc, so more manual intervention.

$ sudo yum -y update kernel-devel
...
Dependencies Resolved

=============================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
 kernel-devel            i686       2.6.14-1.1653_FC4  updates-released  4.1 M
...

So, this is the original problem - yum loads the wrong kernel-devel package,
which I now _have_ to load manually, since yum is no help:

$ sudo yum -y install kernel-devel.i586
...
Nothing to do

kernel-doc.noarch of course has no architecture relationship.

BTW, the original kernel-smp installation was performed by the Fedora Core 4
installer.

There is no dependency from kernel on kernel-devel.
So that's why when you do:
yum update kernel
it doesn't grab kernel-devel, too.

the problem is that kernel-devel is not in the exactarchlist so yum is,
correctly, trying to upgrade it to the .i686 package b/c i686 is an 'upgrade'
over i586 when the package is not in the exactarchlist.

wanna test it? In your yum.conf under [main] add:

exactarchlist = kernel kernel-smp glibc kernel-hugemem kernel-enterprise
kernel-bigmem kernel-devel


all on one line

then remove the i686 kernel-devel and run yum update kernel-devel.

I bet it will work fine then.

$ sudo vim /etc/yum.conf 
...
$ sudo rpm -e kernel-devel-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4
...
$ sudo yum -y update kernel-devel
...
Installed: kernel-devel.i586 0:2.6.14-1.1653_FC4
Complete!

Sure enough, that seems to fix the problem for me.  Hopefully, kernel-devel will
be added to the exactarchlist.

I still find that having fedora install kernel files for different architectures
- i586, i686 - using the _same_ file names, and worse, the same short package
names, causes confusion and consequent problems at times.  I suppose that there
is not much yum can do about that though.  "rpm -q kernel" is useless.  At least
"yum list installed kernel\*" tells which architecture is installed, even though
it is slow to run.

BTW, I saw yum time-out a slow mirror site, select a new mirror, and continue
the install - all by itself.  Very nice.

This seems to be acting up again - I upgraded to kernel-2.6.15-1.1831_FC4 and,
despite the existance of 

 exactarchlist = kernel kernel-smp glibc kernel-hugemem kernel-enterprise
kernel-bigmem kernel-devel

in /etc/yum.conf, yum just installed kernel-devel.i686 instead of kernel-devel.i586.

Now, during the upgrade, I'm running the ccrma real-time i686 kernel, which
seems to run fine on this Athlon machine, so it makes sense that yum might
assume an i686 architecture looking at the running kernel, but that would be an
error.  Yum chose the i586 kernel for the upgrade, and should choose the
corresponding i586 kernel-devel package as well.

Any ideas?

send me:

yum list installed kernel\*

please.

$ yum list installed kernel\*
Installed Packages
kernel.i586                              2.6.15-1.1831_FC4      installed
kernel.i586                              2.6.14-1.1656_FC4      installed
kernel.i586                              2.6.15-1.1830_FC4      installed
kernel.i686                              2.6.14-0.10.rrt.rhfc4. installed
kernel-devel.i586                        2.6.15-1.1830_FC4      installed
kernel-devel.i686                        2.6.15-1.1831_FC4      installed
kernel-devel.i686                        2.6.14-0.10.rrt.rhfc4. installed
kernel-devel.i586                        2.6.14-1.1656_FC4      installed
kernel-doc.noarch                        2.6.15-1.1831_FC4      installed
kernel-module-alsa-2.6.14-0.10.rrt.rhfc4 1.0.10-1.rhfc4.ccrma   installed

okay here is my only and best suggestion:

choose a kernel architecture and go with it, do not mix and match like you're
doing above - that's causing this problem and in a normal situation this would
never happen.

the reason why yum is getting confused, most likely is that a better arch is
trumping a better version. Hence the i686 kernel-devel and i586 kernel.

I don't see this as a yum bug anymore but a system that's just horribly mangled.

Let's look at this more simply:

/lib/modules/<idiot-version>/build is a link to ../../../usr/src/kernels/<version>/

_That_ is a dependency.  The target of the link is either present or missing.
All yum is supposed to do is install somthing called "kernel-devel-<version>".

Here is another clue:
yum installs something called "kernel-<version>".  The package it depends upon
is called, again, "kernel-devel-<version>".

If that's too complex for yum, then yum has some very deep and serious design
problems.

Of course there is also the idiocy of giving different versions of a package the
_same_ install name, and it must be assumed that yum can tell the difference.

Yum can tell the diffence between versions, right?

it's not about version. It is about arch.

Your sarcasm and invective is not helpful.

I'm not kidding.

If you can't figure out how to find the name of the presently-running kernel and
add the string "devel-" into the middle of it...

No, it is NOT about "arch".