Ubuntu
grub2 package

intrepid: grub-pc w/o kernel-helper makes /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot not working

Bug #253581 reported by ibotty on 2008-07-31

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #272885: /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot fails if grub is removed but not purged. Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	grub2 (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Low	Unassigned
Nominated for Jaunty by Carey Underwood

Bug Description

on a recent intrepid (31st of july 2008), when trying to remove an old kernel (say: 2.6.26.4) it complains, that /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot failed due to kernel-helper not existent.

kernel-helper is in package grub.

Revision history for this message

Dyno (dyno-fu) wrote on 2008-08-01:

just confirm this bug.

Changed in grub2:
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Thomas Templin (coastgnu) wrote on 2008-09-06:

kernel-helper script Edit (2.2 KiB, text/plain)

+1 confirm this bug

All operations, adding, removing kernel images fail due to the missing kernel-helper script if grub2 is in use

An apt-file search kernel-helper says:
grub: /usr/sbin/kernel-helper

So I copied a kernel-helper script from another machine and it works.

Solution is:
Add the kernel helper script from the package grub to the package grub2.

Chris Halse Rogers (raof) on 2008-11-16

Changed in grub2:
importance:	Undecided → Low

Revision history for this message

Chris Halse Rogers (raof) wrote on 2008-11-16:

Let's see if I can't do something about this. It'll probably require changes to the grub packaging, though; I don't think we want to ship kernel-helper in both the grub and grub2 packages.

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pkg (paul-gaynor) wrote on 2009-01-30:

I have confirmed this as well. old kernels cannot be removed when you switch to grub2 because of the missing kernel-helper script

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kieran (daralantarial) wrote on 2009-01-31:

move kernel-helper into grub-common, which is prereq for both grub and grub2/grub-pc

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Jordan (jordanu) wrote on 2009-02-01:

grub-common is not a dependency of grub.

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Carey Underwood (cwillu) wrote on 2009-03-04:

This hurts a lot more now that ext4 is being considered for prime-time, as grub2 has support for booting an ext4 partition directly, while grub requires a separate boot partition.

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Chris Halse Rogers (raof) wrote on 2009-03-10: Re: [Bug 253581] Re: intrepid: grub-pc w/o kernel-helper makes /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot not working

grub in Ubuntu will boot from ext4 just fine.

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Jan Nieuwenhuizen (janneke) wrote on 2009-03-23:

This has gotten worse. Kernels packages now cannot be removed anymore
when the kernel-helper script is missing. Should I file a bug with linux-image,
it seems that needs this script without "depend"ing on it?

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Nith (nith1210) wrote on 2009-04-16:

#10

Confirming this bug. I modified /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot and simply commented out /usr/sbin/kernel-helper -i and was successfully able to remove a kernel. kernel-helper should be removed by grub when you uninstall it and some equivalent check should be installed by grub2. It really feels like grub2 is a symptom not the problem. Do people who switch from grub to lilo have this issue?

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Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote on 2010-11-25:

#11

I think this is essentially bug 272885, fixed in Ubuntu 9.04; see my comments there. If you still have grub installed but are actually using grub-pc, then you might need to 'dpkg --purge grub' to make the problem go away.

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Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote on 2010-11-25:

#12

(And kernel-helper no longer exists, so it's not worth making any other changes to grub2 at this point.)