Description of problem: The installonly plugin was merged in yum and allows to keep some versions of some packages when updating. By default, the kernel package is kept in 3 versions. However, in F10, the kernel package was split into a kernel and a kernel-firmware packages. Yum should also be configured to keep the kernel-firmware package in 3 versions as booting an older kernel might not work if your hardware relies on some firmware in the kernel-firmware package. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-3.2.19-5.fc10.noarch How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. run yum update when there is a new kernel to update Actual results: The new kernel will be installed (eventually removing an older one) and the kernel-firmware package will be updated. Expected results: Both the new kernel and kernel-firmware packages should be installed only (eventually removing an older version of both of them).
Added kernel-firmware to the installonly list upstream, should be fixed for Fedora 10.
Adding it to installonly isn't really sufficient (or a good idea) as the kernel-firmware package isn't made to have multiple versions installed. The files from different versions of the package are almost certain to have conflicts.
Ok, so -1 for me believing stuff would be sane. So what's the next fix? It seems like Fedora should make sure kernel-firmware can be installed multiple times, no? I can obviously revert the yum upstream change before Seth puts it into rawhide, but then it's still going to be broken for anyone that relies on it. Is there another fix (like maybe having the kernel-firmware package be version neutral? I'll reassign to the kernel-firmware package to see what they want to do.
We don't keep multiple versions of _any_ of our firmware packages (iwl4965-firmware, ql2100-firmware, etc.). The kernel-firmware package is no different. The firmware which is shipped on its own in those separate packages is much more likely to be under active development, while the firmware within the kernel package is from older drivers and is much less likely to receive changes. So if we get away with having no 'roll-back' for the separate packages, we should definitely be OK with it for the kernel-firmware package. The latest kernel-firmware package should always be sufficient; there's no need to install multiple versions of it.
Ok, I've reverted the yum change ... kernel-firmware isn't installonly anymore. I guess that means you're going to close this not a bug, but I'll let you do it.
Sorry for not being that smart, but I didn't really understand... :/ kernel-firmware and kernel are to be used together. We keep 3 versions of kernel. Why don't we keep 3 versions of kernel-firmware ? For example, let's say I have a nvidia graphic card and I'm using the kmod-nvidia from "the other repository". If I keep 3 different kernels, I should keep 3 different kmods (one by kernel) as both are needed to use my computer. Is there any difference in the case of the kernel-firmware package ?
Yes, there is. You don't need multiple versions of the kernel-firmware package; the latest is fine. Just like all the _other_ firmware packages we have in Fedora (iwl4965-firmware, qla2xxx-firmware, libertas-firmware, etc.) It's slightly confusing, I know, that we generate the kernel-firmware package as part of the kernel build. We'll be fixing that soon, and will decouple the version numbers. But it's purely cosmetic.