Re: What's the purpose of initrd.img{,.old} and vmlinuz{,.old} symlinks in the root dir?
On Sun 01 Mar 2020 at 18:11:07 (+0100), Mikhail Morfikov wrote:
> On 01/03/2020 17:15, mick crane wrote:
> > On 2020-02-29 18:17, Mikhail Morfikov wrote
> >
> >> vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-4-amd64
> >> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2020-02-24 00:37:53
> >> vmlinuz.old -> boot/vmlinuz-5.5.4-amd64
> >>
> >
> > .old is pointing to a newer kernel ?
> >
> > mick
> >
>
> Yes, it is because I updated recently the debian kernel. So I think it thinks
> the older is newer now. But after moving the links to the /boot/ dir, I get:
>
> $ ls -al /boot/ | egrep "vmlinuz|initrd"
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2020-03-01 15:18:21 initrd.img -> initrd.img-5.5.4-amd64
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39127233 2020-02-14 17:23:07 initrd.img-5.4.0-4-amd64
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16005450 2020-03-01 14:41:38 initrd.img-5.5.4-amd64
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2020-03-01 15:18:21 initrd.img.old -> initrd.img-5.4.0-4-amd64
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 2020-03-01 15:18:21 vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-5.5.4-amd64
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5627632 2020-02-13 06:14:49 vmlinuz-5.4.0-4-amd64
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9331760 2020-02-26 09:38:52 vmlinuz-5.5.4-amd64
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2020-03-01 15:18:21 vmlinuz.old -> vmlinuz-5.4.0-4-amd64
>
> So the .old points now to the older one. But I don't need the debian kernel
> anyway since I build it on my own. I haven't removed it just in case. :] But
> I think I will remove it when I set everything up to avoid such situations.
I haven't had to compile a linux kernel for probably 15 years, but I
always used an epoch so that my kernel-image package could have the
correct version number but would always be viewed as newer by the
APT programs. It was just a matter of adding 5: between the underscore
and the upstream version. (5 is a random choice, you could choose
202003051130: if you wanted to timestamp it.)
Cheers,
David.
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