Switching Fedora kernels

Ask Fedora
, , , , , ,
1

I’m running Fedora 38 on an 2018 Intel Mac mini. When I originally set this up, I could not get Fedora 37 to install a boot loader. So, I discovered the fedora-mbp ISOs. When I installed using that, then the boot loader installed and Fedora successfully booted.

I upgraded to Fedora 38 and have been chugging along.

Now I want to upgrade to Fedora 39, but there is only an experimental kernel available from fedora-mbp.

I am not using any of the extra features that this kernel provides, since I am uning this as a headless server. I don’t need WiFi. I don’t need Bluetooth. I don’t need power management. I just need hardware video decoding.

So, I think I should be OK to switch to the default Fedora kernel. I just want to make sure that will not break anything, since I know the fedora-mbp pulls binary blobs from the MacOS partition for use with the kernel.

I saw a few threads that said USB hot swap won’t work with the default kernel, but I don’t care about that either since this is my home sever.

I’m also a little confused about why the Fedora 37 DVD I used in the past would not write a boot loader. Should it not have used EFI and just used the existing EFI partition for booting?

2

You should be able to install the Fedora 38 stock kernel and attempt to boot to it. If that boot fails, you can press a button during boot up to get to the grub menu and switch to your old kernel. Fedora keeps a few kernels around by default, so you generally shouldn’t get stuck if a kernel upgrade goes wonky for some reason. Installing a new kernel will update the bootloader in the process.

3

Ok, now to do some homework on installing a kernel.

4

Well, that took a little bit of work. I had to go into every repo file and remove the exclude command. Then a makecache and then I was able to install the stock Fedora kernel. Machine rebooted and I am on the stock kernel. Just need to test h.264/h.265 decoding in Plex and I should be all set.

If it all works, I will upgrade to Fedora 39 tomorrow.

1 Like
5

This might be helpful if you run into any trouble with it:

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia?highlight=(\bCategoryHowto\b)

6

This also may help.

Steps 3 & 5 are related to the multimedia part.