Kernel upgrade strategy question

Question

First of all congrats to the community for a successful upgrade to 2.6.31.  I had the usual mismatch in timing this morning with Virtualbox, and while tempting to remove VB, patience prevailed for a few hours and upgrades for VB as well as the kernel showed, and all worked smoothly. 
My Question:
Why do we upgrade the primary kernel AND the fallback at the same time?  For example ubuntu retains the old kernels in menu.lst in case of problems.
I suspect i know at least part of the answer, that it is related to the rolling release model, and that apps designed for the newer kernel might not work with the old one anyway.  However would having a fallback on the prior kernel not at least offer a means to boot up and look at your system in event of panic?
Last edited by chender (2009-10-10 20:58:28)

Answer 1

That's not a fallback kernel. It's a fallback initrd. The only difference is that the fallback contains every driver that could be useful for booting, rather than just the ones detected as needed when they are built.
If you want an actual fallback kernel, install kernel26-lts.
Edit: too slow.
Last edited by ataraxia (2009-10-10 21:04:25)