Running on old Kernel, howto always use the most up to date one?

Hello together,
i am using fedora as my daily system for over a year now.
I’m running it on a 13 inch framework notebook and using Fedora Linux 41 (Workstation Edition).
If i run “uname -a” it tells me that i am on 6.8.5-301.fc40.x86_64

If i run "rpm -q kernel-core " the output is:
kernel-core-6.8.5-301.fc40.x86_64
kernel-core-6.12.7-200.fc41.x86_64
kernel-core-6.12.8-200.fc41.x86_64

I can boot up in such a newer kernel while interrupting the normal boot process, but i wasn’t able to figure out how to automatically use the newest kernel installed… Is this something that should work out of the box? Or do i have to configure something?

Kind regards,
Marcel

It should just use the newest kernel automatically.

Looking at that output it would seem that you might have set the original installation kernel for f40 as default and thus that kernel has never been replaced. (New kernel installs never replace the currently booted kernel)

You can see the default kernel with
sudo grubby --default-kernel
and you can see the default kernel index with
sudo grubby --default-index

One way to ensure the system always boots from the newest kernel would be to set the default index to 0. sudo grubby --set-default-index=0 This is by default the setting for fedora.

Another possibility as to why this is happening could lie within the grubenv file.
Please show us the output of sudo grub2-editenv - list

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The newest kernel should appear at the top of the list presented to you in the grub2 menu when you switch your laptop on.

Select it and it’ll boot the system with that kernel - in your case, 6.12.8 although 6.12.9 should be waiting for you to install.

That should then be the option selected by default on the next and boot.

The sudo grubby --set-default-index=0 command worked like a charme, thank you very much :)!

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