Preparing To Upgrade - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 System Administration Manual

Chapter 36. Manually Upgrading the Kernel
Note
kernel-hugemem is required for memory configurations higher than 16 GB.
• PAE (Physical Address Extension) or 3 level paging on x86 processors that support PAE
• Support for multiple processors
• 4GB/4GB split — 4GB of virtual address space for the kernel and almost 4GB for each user
process on x86 systems
• kernel-hugemem-devel — Contains the kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel-hugemem package.
• kernel-smp — Contains the kernel for multi-processor systems. The following are the key
features:
• Multi-processor support
• Support for more than 4 GB of RAM (up to 16 GB for x86)
• PAE (Physical Address Extension) or 3 level paging on x86 processors that support PAE
• kernel-smp-devel — Contains the kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel-smp package.
• kernel-utils — Contains utilities that can be used to control the kernel or system hardware.
• kernel-doc — Contains documentation files from the kernel source. Various portions of the
Linux kernel and the device drivers shipped with it are documented in these files. Installation of this
package provides a reference to the options that can be passed to Linux kernel modules at load
time.
By default, these files are placed in the /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-<version>/ directory.
Note
The kernel-source package has been removed and replaced with an RPM that can
only be retrieved from Red Hat Network. This *.src.rpm must then be rebuilt locally
using the rpmbuild command. Refer to the latest distribution Release Notes, including
all updates, at
obtaining and installing the kernel source package.

36.2. Preparing to Upgrade

Before upgrading the kernel, take a few precautionary steps. The first step is to make sure working
boot media exists for the system in case a problem occurs. If the boot loader is not configured properly
to boot the new kernel, the system cannot be booted into Red Hat Enterprise Linux without working
boot media.
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