Purge-kernels not working

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi guys, how ya doing?

I have this problem in the purge-kernels service that means I am slowly filling up my openSUSE partition with old kernels. I ran systemctl status purge-kernels and this is what I got:

purge-kernels.service - Purge old kernels
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/purge-kernels.service; enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
           start condition failed at Sat 2014-05-17 15:24:54 CEST; 29min ago
           ConditionPathExists=/boot/do_purge_kernels was not met

What can I do to reactivate it?

Thanks for reading and have a very nice day.

2

It is activated.
But it is only run at boot if the file /boot/do_purge_kernels exists. This gets created when you install/update a kernel package.
You can create it yourself of course to trigger the start of the purge-kernel script:

sudo touch /boot/do_purge_kernels

Or just run the script yourself:

sudo /sbin/purge-kernels

What kernels do you have installed btw? There only 2 in openSUSE 13.1 yet.
Or are you running Tumbleweed?
There’s a known problem with the purge-kernels script in that it cannot cope with Tumbleweed’s kernel versioning. (I don’t know whether this is fixed yet, but I think not)
The same is true for the kernels from the Kernel:stable repo I believe.

You can uninstall unneeded kernel packages manually yourself as well though.
Just select the kernel package in YaST->Software Management and click on the “Versions” tab below the package list to list all available/installed versions.
Or specify the exact version to zypper, f.e.:

sudo zypper rm kernel-desktop-3.11.6-4.1
3

I added the Kernel_stable repo and right now I have 3.14 kernels. If it’s a bad idea I can just remove it and revert to 3.11.

I have several versions of the 3.14, so maybe the wisest thing is to remove the Kernel_stable repo and revert to the official 3.11, and then uninstall all 3.14 kernels. If you could help me do it without breaking anything I’d be most grateful.

Thank you very much for your help!

4

Well, I wouldn’t necessarily call it “a bad idea”, but as I said, the purge-kernels script does not work with those package versions unfortunately.
And it’s unlikely to be fixed any more, because mkinitrd (which contains that script) is dead and has been replaced by dracut in Factory.

So you could try out dracut, it should be fixed there. I have no idea about dracut’s status though.
But better use the latest version from here:
http://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=Base%3ASystem&package=dracut
The one included in openSUSE 13.1 does not even have a purge-kernels script yet.

Or have a look here:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820367
This also includes a patch that should fix the issue, which is part of latest dracut’s purge-kernels. As /sbin/purge-kernels is only a script, you can easily change it yourself accordingly.
Just open it in a text editor (as root), f.e. with:

kdesu kwrite /sbin/purge-kernels

Just remove line 151:

    return ($ver1 eq substr($ver2, 0, length($ver1)));

and replace it with the following lines:

    return 1 if $ver1 eq $ver2;
    # copied from kernel-source/rpm/kernel-spec-macros
    $ver2 =~ s/\.[0-9]+($|\.^.]*^.0-9]^.]*$)/$1/;
    return $ver1 eq $ver2;

I have several versions of the 3.14, so maybe the wisest thing is to remove the Kernel_stable repo and revert to the official 3.11, and then uninstall all 3.14 kernels. If you could help me do it without breaking anything I’d be most grateful.

I already told you how to uninstall specific kernel versions, see my previous post.

Regarding your conflicts, I cannot say much without reading the exact messages.