Comments on: The kernel collection

By: Claire Connelly

Claire Connelly — Sat, 24 May 2008 18:24:25 +0000

I wrote the following script to clean up extra kernels. It will leave you with the newest kernel and the kernel you’re currently running if they aren’t the same.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

### zap-kernels – remove old kernels from system
###
### C.M. Connelly
###
### Tue Jul 22 15:43:24 PDT 2003

use strict;

my $current_kernel = `uname -r`;
$current_kernel =~ s/smp$//;

my @packages = grep { m/^kernel/ } ( `rpm -qa` );
my @kernels;

foreach my $kind ( “”, “-smp” ) {
my $numberadded = 0;
foreach my $package ( sort @packages ) {
if ( $package =~ m/^kernel$kind-2/ ) {
unless ( $package =~ m/$current_kernel/ ) {
chomp $package;
push @kernels, $package;
++$numberadded;
}
}
}
if ( $numberadded != 0 ) {
my $newest_kernel = pop @kernels;
# print “Removing $newest_kernel from the list of $numberadded bad kernels.\n”;
}
}

#print “Bad kernels!\n@kernels\n”;

`rpm -e –allmatches @kernels`;

By: Jim Perrin

Jim Perrin — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:45:49 +0000

For newer centos/RHEL installs, yes and that’s a very good point. I’d forgotten about the yum-utils bits.

For CentOS 3, yum is too old to support yum-utils enhancements though.

By: Bart Schaefer

Bart Schaefer — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:48:47 +0000

There’s also “package-cleanup –oldkernels” from the yum-utils package.

By: David Hrbáč

David Hrbáč — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:38:23 +0000

Simple way:
if [ $(rpm -q kernel | wc -l) -gt 1 ]; then rpm -e $(rpm -q kernel | sed ‘$d’); fi
if [ $(rpm -q kernel-smp | wc -l) -gt 1 ]; then rpm -e $(rpm -q kernel-smp | sed ‘$d’); fi