Upgrade to 3.8.8-100: now boot loops ! solved: grub2 bug.

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 2013-05-02 at 13:17 -0400, sean darcy wrote: 
> On 04/30/2013 02:05 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
> > On 04/30/2013 10:14 AM, Reindl Harald wrote:
> >> * make sure "installonly_limit" in "/etc/yum.conf" is high enough to not
> >>    remove the 3.7.x
> >
> > If you really want to be safe:
> >
> > yum remove kernel
> >
> > will remove all installed kernels *except* for the one you're currently
> > using.  (That is, yum won't allow you to leave yourself without a kernel
> > for the next time you boot.)  You probably don't need to be this
> > heavy-handed, but you never know when something like this might come in
> > handy.
> 
> I did that. Ran yum update. Same problem.
> 
> But I figured it out. I've been planning to upgrade to F18 when I have 
> the courage. I've run fedup. But then when I upgrade to a new F17, 
> grub2, in it's infinite wisdom, places all the upgrade stuff from a 
> fedup boot to the command line of the new F17 kernel.
> 
> Only way to fix is to go edit grub.cfg itself. And you need to keep 
> doing it with every kernel upgrade. Sigh.

GRUB2 works more like LILO than like old GRUB, in that there is a
configuration file to edit and an installation procedure to get the boot
process to use the updated configuration.

The file to edit is /etc/default/grub.  The installation command is 

        grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

That command runs some scripts that create /boot/grub2/grub.cfg,
which--as you've discovered--you should never edit.

/etc/default/grub is a set of shell variable definitions.  The one you
want to edit is GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, which contains a template for the
kernel command line arguments.  Once this is fixed, the kernel update
process should work correctly.

If have trouble figuring out what to fix, post the contents of
your /etc/default/grub here.

If you are annoyed by the "missing font file" error message when grub2
starts, add the line 

        LANG=C

to the top of that file.


> 
> sean
> 
> 

-- 
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu