by Ok, so I know that Redhat doesn’t recommend upgrading Fedora by changing your yum repositories and doing a yum upgrade. However, it got me from Core 2 to Core 3 to Core 4. I couldn’t understand what harm it could be to use it to go to Core 5. Yes, I’m behind, but not like you might think. I actually started this a couple of months ago before my daughter was born; I’ve been a little busy since then.
I did my normal procedure and did the upgrade. Everything appeared to go fine, the downloads happened, the new packages installed, there weren’t a whole lot of problems to work over. Then I tried to reboot to the new kernel. And the booting stopped after udev. Since I didn’t have a lot of time that day, I went ahead and booted back to the Core 4 kernel, and everything worked. Fast forward a couple of months, without having to reboot my system….
Yesterday, thanks to the snowstorm, working from home, and a particularly boring conference call, I tried to boot into the Core 5 kernel again. And had the same problem, it stopped after udev. I would have said it hung, but it seemed like it was trying to do something, the disk LED flashed, I could type on the console (not that it did anything, obviously). However, I let it sit for like half an hour and it didn’t progress any further.
So, I booted back into Core 4 (again). And decided that I hadn’t run a yum update since that day a couple of months ago, so I’d try that and then reboot again. And it still stopped. I decided to go back to Core 4 again. But this time, I couldn’t. Core 4 would stop as well. Uh oh!
I went looking on the net for “fedora udev hang”, and found lots of people suggesting to turn off ACPI, although most of those were related to laptops. But, I tried anyway. And got nowhere. Then I found several suggestions to add mem=1000M to the kernel line. But, I only have 256M of memory in that machine (224 after 32M video sharing). Just by chance, I have a 512M DIMM sitting around. I switched out the 256M for the 512M, and the system booted up immediately into Core 4, Core 5 (two month old), and Core 5 (today).
Did Fedora’s memory requirements change that much between Core 4 and Core 5? I can’t find anything on the web that would suggest that, everyone suggests 64M should still be fine for booting the kernel. Although, I did fine one site that listed a “minimum” of 192M for graphical boot, and 512M recommended. Guess if I decide to upgrade to Core 6, I’ll make sure to have another 512M stick on hand, just in case! Or, hopefully, I can just put the 256M back in and get 768M, and save getting a 512M for Core 7!