RPM issues with Leap 16.0?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi there,
are there known issues with RPM in Leap 16.0?
I’m trying to install kernel-source-longterm-6.18.38-lp160.6.1.g95ff0f3.noarch.rpm now for more than 20 minutes and it stalls at 50% progress, the rpm process does not seem to be dead, dmesg doesn’t show suspicious things. du -sh /usr/src/linux-longterm/ shows 1,7G which suggests, the package content is installed, yet, rpm does not finish…

Any thoughts or hints?
PS, I use the longterm kernel, because of better mobile Ryzen support, did this for a while now successfully.
PPS, I install using rpm -Uhv the downloaded rpm file.

2

Why do you use rpm instead of zypper? Do you want to build your own kernel?

Why do you install the source package then?

Something is missing in the overall picture…

3

Yes, I build my own kernel. It just takes 2 packages, kernel-devel-longterm (1st to be installed) and kernel-source-longterm. If I had used zypper, the situation would not be different, it is just a frontend for rpm, the stall issue probably would be the same.

I did the exact procedure many times before, successfully. Thus my question if rpm got some known issues recently.

Crap, if i only made the command more verbose, I’d have some clue now…
I’ll wait now some hours to see if it finishes.

Does rpm understand any signal to make it tell, what it currently does?
Maybe it makes some changes to the rpm database?
A recent zypper up worked just fine.

4

After doing rpmdb --rebuilddb I now was able to install the kernel sources rpm, this time using zypper in.

Yet, after success installation there was a lock file left /var/lib/rpm/.rpm.lock

Zypper and rpm shouldn’t leave a lock file left.
I didn’t kill the last zypper command.

5

Checking here:

ls -l /var/lib/rpm/.rpm*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 18  2025 /var/lib/rpm/.rpm.lock

It does not seem to be causing a problem. And I’ll note that its date is rather old – I think that’s from before I upgraded to Leap 16.

6

I thought I would check too (for feedback):

myuser@machine:~> ls -l /var/lib/rpm/.rpm*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Apr  8  2024 /var/lib/rpm/.rpm.lock
myuser@machine:~>

… and have no issues. Admittedly, this is on Leap 15.6.

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7

I guess, when using the zypper command it may not care about this lock file, but when calling rpm directly, rpm might get in trouble.

I used rpm directly and ran into problems, maybe zypper magically doesn’t care about this lock file. Just a guess. Nevertheless, I deleted it, after checking with pgrep rpm no stale rpm process is left.

I’m now going to avoid calling rpm directly and rather will use zypper. Was an old habit using rpm directly.

8

TLDR; rpm is not aware of configured repos. zypper is. Hence, to install a locally downloaded package one should use sudo zypper -vvv install ./$package instead of sudo rpm -iUvh ./$package

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