Dnf versionlock kernel include modules?

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1

Hello,
I’d like to lock my kernel for a little bit using versionlock, but I am still a bit confused how to do so.

in this topic the idea is to simply run

sudo dnf versionlock add kernel-5.12.18-200.fc33

But here a different author mentioned that it’s necessary to lock

kernel-core
kernel-modules-extra
kernel-modules

as well. Can anybody tell me which one is correct and whether this is documented somewhere? Think that would be quite useful to mention somewhere in the docs.

2

The kernel package is a “metapackage”, so it doesn’t actually include any files:

$ rpm -ql kernel-5.16.5-200.fc35.x86_64
(contains no files)

It pulls in the kernel-core and kernel-modules sub-packages. So you can only go sudo dnf install kernel and everything gets installed. You can see this in the requires of the kernel package:

$ rpm -q --requires kernel-5.16.5-200.fc35.x86_64
kernel-core-uname-r = 5.16.5-200.fc35.x86_64
kernel-modules-uname-r = 5.16.5-200.fc35.x86_64
rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1
rpmlib(FileDigests) <= 4.6.0-1
rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1
rpmlib(PayloadIsXz) <= 5.2-1

I think it should be sufficient to lock only the kernel package, because while that is locked, dnf will not want to remove its dependencies either (the kernel-core and kernel-modules) packages, but I haven’t locked the kernel in ages so I cannot tell for sure.

The kernel-modules-extra package is an extra (optional) package, and as we see, it is not required by the kernel. So I expect that will need to be locked separately.

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