On Tue 09 Jan 2018 at 18:18:27 (-0500), Felix Miata wrote: > Here's a portion of /boot/ on one I just updated minutes ago: > > lrwxrwxrwx 1 26 Jan 9 17:47 initrd -> initrd.img-4.9.0-5-686-pae > lrwxrwxrwx 1 26 Jan 9 17:47 initrd-cur -> initrd.img-4.9.0-5-686-pae > -rw-r--r-- 1 17388979 Jan 9 17:45 initrd.img-4.9.0-4-686-pae > -rw-r--r-- 1 17067283 Oct 21 03:00 .initrd.img-4.9.0-4-686-pae1 > -rw-r--r-- 1 17388194 Oct 21 04:51 .initrd.img-4.9.0-4-686-pae2 > -rw-r--r-- 1 17388979 Jan 9 17:45 .initrd.img-4.9.0-4-686-pae3 > -rw-r--r-- 1 17392772 Jan 9 17:44 initrd.img-4.9.0-5-686-pae > -rw-r--r-- 1 17392772 Jan 9 17:44 .initrd.img-4.9.0-5-686-pae1 > lrwxrwxrwx 1 26 Oct 21 03:18 initrd-prv -> initrd.img-4.9.0-4-686-pae > lrwxrwxrwx 1 23 Jan 9 17:47 vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-4.9.0-5-686-pae > -rw-r--r-- 1 3643920 Dec 22 19:39 vmlinuz-4.9.0-4-686-pae > -rw-r--r-- 1 3645296 Jan 4 06:12 vmlinuz-4.9.0-5-686-pae > lrwxrwxrwx 1 23 Jan 9 17:46 vmlinuz-cur -> vmlinuz-4.9.0-5-686-pae > lrwxrwxrwx 1 23 Oct 21 03:18 vmlinuz-prv -> vmlinuz-4.9.0-4-686-pae > > Note the additional symlinks, and the in-place initrd backups.
I understand keeping backups, but what are the symlinks for? Your backups are already renamed with suffixes, and also hidden with dots. > If what happened > to you happened to me, and I was unable to rebuild the 4.9.0.5 initrd or > anything else to solve the problem, I would purge the 4.9.0.5 kernel, delete > the > -cur symlinks, and copy the -prv symlinks back to vmlinuz and initrd. If and > when an update brings a 4.9.0.6 or newer kernel, the 4.9.0.4 would be > retained, > as 4.9.0.5 would have if it hadn't been purged. They're actually 4.9.0-4 and 4.9.0-5. I don't know how stable the 4.9 kernels are as I can't see into the future, but just to point out that jessie was stuck on 3.16.0-4 from at least November 2014 (five months before its release) until this week. Wheezy was even longer in the tooth; my 7.1 installation disk has 3.2.0-4 images dated 9 June 2013 and I upgraded yesterday, so at that rate you'd be waiting nearly five years. Cheers, David.
