Only do a kernel update via zypper dup and skip the other updates?

English Hardware
1

Hi,
i have a problem with my laptop. I did an update a few days, maybe weeks ago (via zypper dup), and as i started the laptop again a few days ago, the system hung during the boot process. This seems kind of reproducible so i started the system with an older kernel via grub and did another zypper dup. I got a new kernel build (same version though), and this seemed to solve the problem at first. But today i noticed, that the problem was not solved by the new kernel build. The problem is more complex as it seems. Sometimes the system hangs during boot and sometimes only after maybe 5-10 minutes of normal desktop use (i do not have a big sample size though).

The bad thing is, my system only keeps the last two kernel versions, so i cannot test the older version from a few weeks ago to check if it is related to the kernel or not.

now my actual problem: i want to update the kernel at the next occasion, but because of the instability of the system i would like to only do the kernel update via zypper dup and skip all the other packages, this way i hope that system will survice the upgrade process and i can test if the newer kernel solves the problem.

Is this possible?

2

You should be able to use:

zypper update kernel-default

to only update the kernel.

And a note. On my Tumbleweed systems, I edit the file “/etc/zypp/zypp.conf”. I change the “multiversion.kernels” line to say:

multiversion.kernels = oldest,latest,latest-1,running

If you compare that to your system, you will see that I inserted “oldest”.

The system that I am looking at currently has a 5.14 kernel and two 5.15 kernels. That “oldest” keeps the 5.14 kernel around.

When Tumbleweed moves to a 5.16 kernel, and assuming that the 5.15 kernels are still working, I will manually remove that 5.14 kernel, so that a 5.15 kernel becomes the oldest that is locked in.

3

You can get newer kernels from here: https://software.opensuse.org/package/kernel-default (Kernel:stable or Kernel:HEAD).
You can get older kernels from here: https://download.opensuse.org/history/ or https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tiwai:/kernel:/

Create bug report.

4

How to you manually remove a kernel?

5

I use Yast Software Management.

I do a search for “kernel”. Then I click the “Versions” tab, and deselect the kernel that I don’t want. I do the same for kernel-devel and for any kmp package tied to that kernel.