rawhide report: 20050420 changes

Rodd Clarkson rodd at clarkson.id.au
Thu Apr 21 01:47:15 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 21:33 -0400, Jim Cornette wrote:

> Same  problem noted here. I also observed that these errors referenced 
> kernel versions that I no longer have on this system. The error seems to 
> be related to kernel-devel because the errors included an uninstalled 
> kernel, however the devel packages ae never removed.
> 
> kernel-devel-2.6.11-1.1236_FC4 - error referenced
> kernel-devel-2.6.11-1.1238_FC4 - need to manually remove
> kernel-devel-2.6.11-1.1240_FC4
> kernel-devel-2.6.11-1.1251_FC4
> 
> vs.
> 
>   rpm -q kernel
> kernel-2.6.11-1.1240_FC4
> kernel-2.6.11-1.1251_FC4

Mmm, I've got the matching kernel and kernel-devel packages installed.
Now I think about it, this mmap error isn't to do with the kernel but
with kernel-devel.  The errors occur when kernel-devel is installed, not
kernel.

This makes me wonder if it hasn't got something to do with the 'magic'
kernel-devel uses to try and keep the amount of similar files down so as
to keep the install size smaller.  As I understand it, kernel-devel
hardlinks same files so that they are only installed once (rather than
for each package).  This is part of the reason why installing and
removing kernel-devel takes a little longer (it had to check if the
hardlink is the last instance, and thus if it needs to be removed.)  I
could be wrong about all this, but I remember it being discussed a
little while back and think it's pretty close to what happens.


R.




More information about the test mailing list