Description of problem: In addressing another bug, typed: yum install kernel, it installed both 32- and 64-bit kernels simultaneously. After that machine was a right mess - deleting the 32-bit kernel deleted the only initrd thingie file.
1. how does having multiple kernels installed make the machine a problem? 2. is there some other 'more correct' behavior?
These are multiple kernels with the same n-v-r but just different architectures. And since only one of them works, yes it's a problem. Doesn't yum a have special-case to avoid installing more than one kernel, so it doesn't install both x86_64 and i386 kernels or both ppc and ppc64 kernels simultaneously?
This resulted in a reboot loading the 32-bit kernel I believe; not good.
In current yum you can set multilib_policy=best in your yum.conf to make it use the ppc32 arch ONLY unless you explicitly specify ppc64. This should ameliorate the problem if not outright fix it.