Preparing to Upgrade
Before you upgrade your kernel, you must take a few precautionary
steps. The first step is to make sure you have a working boot diskette
for your system in case a problem occurs. If the boot loader is not configured
properly to boot the new kernel, you will not be able to boot your
system unless you have a boot diskette.
To create a boot diskette for your system, you need to determine which
version of the kernel you are currently running. Execute the following command:
You must be root to create a boot diskette for your system. Login as
root at a shell prompt, and type the following command (where
kernelversion is the output of the
uname -r command):
/sbin/mkbootdisk kernelversion |
 | Tip |
|---|
| | Refer to the man page for mkbootdisk for more options.
|
Reboot your machine with the boot diskette and verify that it works before
continuing.
Hopefully, you will not have to use the diskette, but you should store
it in a safe place just in case.
To determine which kernel packages you have installed, execute the
following command at a shell prompt:
The output will contain some or all of the following packages, depending
on what type of installation you performed (your version numbers and
packages may differ):
kernel-2.4.18-7.95
kernel-debug-2.4.18-7.95
kernel-source-2.4.18-7.95
kernel-doc-2.4.18-7.95
kernel-pcmcia-cs-3.1.27-12
kernel-smp-2.4.18-7.95 |
From the output, you can determine which packages you need to download
for the kernel upgrade. For a single processor system, the only required
package is the kernel package.
If you have a computer with more than one processor, you need the
kernel-smp package that contains support for
multiple processors. It is recommended that you also install the
kernel package in case the multi-processor kernel
does not work properly for your system.
If you have a computer with more than four gigabytes of memory, you
need the kernel-bigmem package.
Again, it is recommended that
you also install the kernel package for debugging
purposes. The kernel-bigmem package is only built
for the i686 architecture.
If you are upgrading the kernel on a laptop or are using
PCMCIA, the kernel-pcmcia-cs package is also
required.
You do not need the kernel-source package unless
you plan to recompile the kernel yourself or plan to perform kernel
development. The kernel-doc package contains kernel
development documentation and is not required. The
kernel-util package includes utilities that can be
used to control the kernel or the system's hardware and is not required.
Red Hat builds kernels that are optimized for different x86
versions. The options are athlon for AMD
Athlon™ and AMD Duron™ systems,
i686 for IntelŪ
PentiumŪ II, IntelŪ PentiumŪ III, and IntelŪ
PentiumŪ 4 systems, and i586 for IntelŪ
PentiumŪ and AMD K6™ systems. If you do not know the
version of your x86 system, use the kernel built for the i386
version; it is built for all x86-based systems.
The x86 version of the RPM package is included in the file name. For
example, kernel-2.4.18-7.95.athlon.rpm is
optimized for AMD Athlon™ and AMD Duron™ systems and
kernel-2.4.18-7.95.i686.rpm is optimized for
IntelŪ PentiumŪ II, IntelŪ PentiumŪ III, and IntelŪ
PentiumŪ 4 systems. When you have determined which packages you need
to upgrade your kernel, select the proper architecture for the
kernel, kernel-smp, and
kernel-bigmem packages. Use the
i386 versions of the other packages.
