On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 09:03 -0400, Stephen Powell wrote: > On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:26:40 -0400 (EDT), Mitchell Laks wrote: > > > > I notice that others had problems with grub not updating the kernel > > from linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686 to linux-image-2.6.32-3-amd64 > > and I had this same problem. > > > > I suspect that this is because the heuristic that dpkg or apt or aptitude > > update > > is using > > finds that linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686 is greater than > > linux-image-2.6.32-3-amd > > 64 alphabetically > > even though it is the older kernel > > and this is breaking all of your automatic grub updates done by debian > > packaging. > > > > that is the reason we are all suffering.... > > I don't think this has anything to do with the package management system. > My guess is that grub2 simply makes a list of all files in /boot which begin > with linux-image, sorts them in descending order by the ASCII collating > sequence, and the one which comes out on top is the default kernel. > The problem is the decision to use "trunk" in the original 2.6.32 kernel > image name. This sorts higher than any numeric value. I use lilo; so this > doesn't affect me; but doesn't grub2 have some option for remembering > the last kernel booted and making that the default? If you don't want to > remove/purge the old kernel, it seems to me that that would be the way to go.
Exactly. The relevant code is:
--- /etc/grub.d/10_linux -----------------------------------------------
...
list=`for i in /boot/vmlinu[xz]-* /vmlinu[xz]-* ; do
if grub_file_is_not_garbage "$i" ; then echo -n "$i " ; fi
done`
prepare_boot_cache=
...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Which obviously does not special-case -trunk-, so it sorts based on
LC_COLLATE. Looks as if the -trunk- name was a particularly bad choice
and I'm not sure what is the best way to solve this problem.
The easiest way would be to enforce a strict naming scheme (maybe with
lintian) so the aforementioned code can stay as simple as it is today.
--
.''`. Wolodja Wentland <wentl...@cl.uni-heidelberg.de>
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