Upgrading the Linux Kernel on Red Hat Linux systems

This information is circa September 16, 1999. If a lot of time has passed, you should probably take a look and see if something new is available from Red Hat, especially if a release later than 6.0 has come out, although I am sure these are valuable in any case. The above notes have been quite valuable to me in figuring out how to install the upgrade rpms that Red Hat provides, but they do not answer every question. The 5.2 instructions were pretty complete, but with 6.0 there are some issues:

Back in the 5.2 days, there were 3 rpms that did not begin with "kernel", namely:

These seem to be gone in the 6.0 updates, and we can only hope that you don't need them.

Then, there are a multitude of kernels to choose from.

I don't have a clue what "BOOT" is, and apparently Red Hat ain't telling either. If you have a Pentium II or III, you want the 686 versions. If you have a plain old Pentium or Pentium-MMX, go for the 586. With an AMD K6, you should probably run the 586, but I am guessing. If you have a 386 or 486, the 386 will do (actually these should run on anything, but the higher number chips will give you some optimizations). Use the smp kernels if you have a multiprocessor.

Then there are these. I doesn't seem to hurt to load them, whatever the case. pcmcia is of course stuff to support laptop pcmcia hardware. ibcs is "Intel Binary Compatibility Specification" support, which is intended to allow you to run binaries for other Unices, such as solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and maybe others.

And these last are easy. (They should be the first rpms you load).

When I do rpm -qa | grep kernel, I get:

The last can be ignored (no update for kernelcfg is out yet), but it is interesting to note that 3 kernels need upgrade, including BOOT and the non-smp kernel.