Fedora and 2.6.24.3-12 kernel
This week I ran yum on my Fedora 8 machine and one of the updates available was a new kernel. Ok, fine, so it updated all packages and installed the new kernel and I gave it a reboot. But no normal boot showed up. The kernel crashed while booting.
Now, one would assume a new kernel would have been thoroughly tested before being published, and cause no errors. So not in the case of 2.6.24.3-12.f8. The previous kernel (2.6.23.15-137.fc8) booted still correctly, so I used that one to get into my system.
As Fedora is normally configured to have only 2 kernels installed (the current one and one previous), I would recommend to increase that number, in case a new kernel would also crash. In that case you won’t be able to get into your system in a “normal” way.
So, to do this, edit your /etc/yum.conf and change this line:
installonly_limit=2
into this:
installonly_limit=3
or whatever value you wish, as long as it is higher than 2. This way during an update with a new kernel available, the new kernel would be added and your current working one will also still be around.
Update: the problem can be solved by adding noreplace-paravirt to the kernel arguments.