Following the advice on this mailing list, I rebuilt (from scratch) Centos 7.8. I added the following line into /etc/yum.conf before the first update: exclude=grub2* shim* mokutil The system worked fine. I was able to do general updates yum -y update and all was well. HOWEVER, following Johnny Hughes' directions: a) remove the 'exclude' line from yum.conf b) perform update: yum -y update c) reinstall kernel. Here the instructions were vague, so I typed in... yum reinstall kernel-3.10.0 deriving the "3.10.0" label by the output of rpm -qa | grep kernel Yum got up to the point: Running transaction Installing : kernel-3.10.0-1127.el7.x86_64 1/1 at which point the process appeared to hang. No further output happened for five minutes. I opened a different terminal and entered "shutdown -r now". The result is an unbootable system. What did I do wrong? I must admit that there are multiple copies of advice on the mailing list, so perhaps I followed the wrong one? ------------------------------ So now, I tried the 'repair' mechanism, but couldn't make that work either. So, it was back to initial from-scratch install. David
On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 10:54:50AM -0700, david wrote:> Yum got up to the point: > > Running transaction > Installing : kernel-3.10.0-1127.el7.x86_64 1/1 > > at which point the process appeared to hang. No further output happened for > five minutes. I opened a different terminal and entered "shutdown -r now". > The result is an unbootable system. > > > What did I do wrong? I must admit that there are multiple copies of advice > on the mailing list, so perhaps I followed the wrong one?Your system was most likely rebuilding the initrd, and you interrupted it leaving you with a broken initrd. Try booting off a rescue disk and chroot into the install, and run: dracut -f -v to regenerate all the initrds. Also, you don't need to reinstall the kernel but just do a 'yum update' to get everything up to the latest release. The shim package with the fix is the latest. -- Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>
<snip>>Your system was most likely rebuilding the initrd, and you interrupted >it leaving you with a broken initrd. > >Try booting off a rescue disk and chroot into the install, and run: > >dracut -f -v > >to regenerate all the initrds. > >Also, you don't need to reinstall the kernel but just do a 'yum >update' to get everything up to the latest release. The shim package >with the fix is the latest. > >-- >Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> >___Jonathan et al: On the assumption that all the updates should now "just work", I did a from-scratch reinstall of a minimal Centos 7 system starting from netinstall and added software that I've always added (perl, dhcp, mariadb, etc). I did not exclude shim, etc in "/etc/yum.conf". After all the updates, the system was NOT bootable. I repeated the install and updates, but this time including the line in /etc/yum.conf exclude=grub2* shim* mokutil and ended up with a usable system. This was not the result I was hoping for. David
On 8/4/2020 11:20 AM, Jonathan Billings wrote:>> Running transaction >> Installing : kernel-3.10.0-1127.el7.x86_64 1/1 >> >> at which point the process appeared to hang. No further output happened for >> five minutes. I opened a different terminal and entered "shutdown -r now". >> The result is an unbootable system. >> >> >> What did I do wrong? I must admit that there are multiple copies of advice >> on the mailing list, so perhaps I followed the wrong one? > Your system was most likely rebuilding the initrd, and you interrupted > it leaving you with a broken initrd.Is there some way we could get the initrd rebuild to be more verbose, so that it doesn't appear to hang? It would be nice to get feedback that something is happening, especially on an older, slower system that takes a long time for this step. I run into the same problem with the kernel-devel package, just because of the sheer number of files involved. I've learned to be patient and expect a kernel upgrade on my oldest system to take a very long time. (I need the -devel package to rebuild an ancient 3rd party driver no longer provided by RHEL.)