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Cake day: November 3rd, 2024

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  • neidu3@sh.itjust.workstoLinux@lemmy.mlGRUB is confusing
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    6 days ago

    You have one per installed kernel. Not sure what (if any) automagic is common for removing old kernels, I guess this varies between distros, but at least on my computers, old kernel remain. At least the previous one, maybe more. It comes in handy in case a kernel upgrade breaks something, which it actually did recently on one of my laptops - makes it easier to boot from old kernel and revert.

    EDIT: I just checked. I have just one on my daily driver. It’s quite new, and I don’t think I’ve had a kernel upgrade on that one, so it makes sense.

    On my work laptop (the one with borked kernel upgrade) I have two.

    So what you most likely have is one or more vmlinuz-version-numbers, and then simply a symlink named just vmlinuz to the version you boot from.


  • neidu3@sh.itjust.workstoLinux@lemmy.mlGRUB is confusing
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    6 days ago

    Short answer to your last paragraph:
    vmlinuz is the kernel. It ends with z instead of x, because it’s z-compressed to save space. (I’ve heard that it’s possible to use an uncompressed kernel for that 1ms faster boot time)
    Initramfs (not intramuscular, which my autocorrect thinks is appropriate) is a small filesystem blob, “initial ram filesystem”, meant to be loaded directly into ram to allow the kernel to talk to your hardware via drivers. It also has a lot of binaries needed to perform other tasks that need to run before the root filesystem is mounted.