[Arm-dev] Banana Pi kernel update experience

[Ian Pilcher]

I just ran throught the process of updating from kernel 4.2.3-200 to
4.4.26-201 on my Banana Pi.  Below are a few issues that I encountered.

* The /boot partition is really small, small enough that trying to
   install a single kernel update with yum will fail.

* In large part, this is due to the fact that several (apparently)
   U-Boot-related files get created in /boot:

   - uImage
   - uImage-$(uname -r)
   - uInitrd
   - uInitrd-$(uname -r)

   As far as I can tell, these files are not actually used by the boot
   process on the Banana Pi, but they consume 77MB of the 330MB
   partition.

* During the update process, grubby does not update extlinux.conf.  It
   has to be manually updated in order to boot the new kernel.

   (In combination with the previous issue, this makes me suspect that
   grubby is getting confused and attempting to update a U-Boot
   configuration, rather than the extlinux configuration.)

* For some reason, the kernel RPM has a dependency on
   xorg-x11-drv-vmmouse.  This was provided by kernel-core-4.4.12-301,
   but it moved to kernel-headers in subsequent releases.  As a result,
   a simple "yum update" from 4.2.3-200 to 4.4.26-201 will also attempt
   to install 4.4.12-301 to satisfy this dependency.

-- 
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Ian Pilcher                                         arequipeno at gmail.com
-------- "I grew up before Mark Zuckerberg invented friendship" --------
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