Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 55141
/sbin/installkernel requires lilo
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:47 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.17-14.ext3 i686) Description of problem: /sbin/installkernel requires lilo to be installed, or at least /etc/lilo.conf to be present. Now the default boot loader is grub there is no /etc/lilo.conf. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Do a fresh install of RH 7.2. Choose grub (the default) as your bootloader. 2. cd /usr/src/linux-2.4 && make dep && make && make install Actual Results: If lilo is installed ..... + exec /sbin/installkernel 2.4.7-10custom bzImage /usr/src/linux-2.4.7-10/System.map '' /etc/lilo.conf: No such file or directory If lilo is not installed ...... + exec /sbin/installkernel 2.4.7-10custom bzImage /usr/src/linux-2.4.7-10/System.map '' /sbin/installkernel: /etc/lilo/install: No such file or directory Expected Results: The make should of succeeded. Additional info:
Yes; we even wanted to fix this but there was a very nasty problem: /sbin/installkernel was shared between ALL kernel rpms and while RPM allows one file to be installed from several packages at the same time, it only allows that if the files are EXACTLY the same. If we would change it upgrades would break because of previously installed kernels. The only thing we could do is move it to a package that gets installed only once so that for a future version we are actually in a position to fix this.
*** Bug 55494 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I don't understand why this... 29c29,31 < if [ -x /sbin/lilo ]; then /sbin/lilo; else /etc/lilo/install; fi --- > if [ -f /etc/lilo.conf ]; then > if [ -x /sbin/lilo ]; then /sbin/lilo; else /etc/lilo/install; fi; > fi ie, only run lilo when the person has a lilo.conf. or something in that direction wouldn't work? maybe have a BOOTLOADER parameter or variable or switch? not a rhetorical question or anything, you really lost me on the RPM explantion :) If the problem is having to support both lilo and grub installation, couldn't that be fixed by making the script a little smarter? -Kervin
Hi Arjan, You do realise that your documentation mentions the 'make install' target. If you use grub this is currently borked http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/custom-guide/custom-kernel.html How does MandrakeSoft or some other distrib which uses Grub solve this. Do they have another utility which peeks at the MBR and determine if grub/lilo is installed and then does the right thing ?
I just got email from Jeff Garzik of Mandrakesoft that they use a script called 'detectloader' which does the right thing. Maybe that is under GPL (I don't have Mandrake installed) and RedHat can use the same script or base something of it This would allow RH customers to use grub and not have to muck with /sbin/installkernel in order to get the 'make install' target working
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 53557 ***