Fedora 22 upgrade oddity

[Jon LaBadie]

Using "fedup", I upgraded from F20 to F21 and a few
weeks later to F22.  The F22 upgrade resulted in a
couple of problems, one of which I'll describe here.

After the F22 upgrade, the boot would hang at an early
stage.  I could still boot F21.

Eventually I discovered that dracut was encountering an
error and not producing the file "/boot/initramfs-<version>".

However, the next step of the kernel installation,
grub2-mkconfig was still producing a grub menu entry for
the kernel, but without the necessary last line
"initrd16 initramfs-<version>".

I feel grub2-mkconfig, after the dracut failure,
should not have produced the menu entry at all.

>From F21 I tried to manually run dracut to generate
the F22 initramfs.  Dracut complained about a missing
"bootchart" module.  Yet the F22 repositories did not
contain a bootchart package.  So I reran dracut with
options to ignore bootchart and it succeeded.  grub2-
mkconfig also made a correct boot menu entry.

Further research indicated that bootchart was moved
from being a separate package that was invoked by kernel
boot options to be a standard part of the default
kernel.  When dracut searched for the bootchart module
it encountered a "left-behind", separate bootchart package,
correctly deduced it was the wrong module and failed.
But as noted, grub2-mkconfig completed without showing an error.

Once I removed the old, separate bootchart package
kernel installations, dracut, and grub2-mkconfig all
went smoothly.

In summary, the installation of a new kernel can
seem to complete successfully and yet have encountered
critical errors.  In my case dracut failed but its
error was not considered fatal and the installation
completed as if successful though the new kernel
could not be started.

Jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jonfu at jgcomp.com