[PLUG] Kernel upgrade safety...

[Rahul Sundaram]

ഓം wrote:
> On my laptop, I have been having some trouble with the freezing up of
> display when I enable DPMS. (Mandriva 2008.1)
> So I disabled it.  Still sometimes intermittantly I observe some
> problems (which i believe are caused due to cpufreqd), and now I am
> seeing kernel upgrade packages.
> 
> Again int the description of these packages they have given advisory
> (sort of) precautions to take before kernel upgrade.
> 
> I also assume that any upgrade packages available from distribution
> updates sources should be safe for normal upgrade.
> 
> Any opinions or suggestion on this point from anyone?

Newer revisions of kernel's are installed in parallel. You can easily 
switch back and forth between revisions if one doesn't work. Blindly 
trusting a source otherwise is never a good idea. A distribution can do 
some level of testing on updates but it is never guaranteed to be 
trouble free. Participating early by running a test system with the 
development releases or testing repository can help however.

Rahul