How to keep Virtualbox from being uninstalled by kernel update in yum

Question

I use fedora, and installed virtualbox-ose from rpmfusion. It seems that the virtualbox-ose is compiled against certain kernel versions. If I update kernel with yum update, virtualbox-ose will be removed if older kernel is replaced by newer one.

Is there any good idea about that? How to keep my virtualbox from being uninstalled in this way, while I want to keep my system update-to-date as more as possible?

Answer 1

RPMFusion provides two types of kernel module packages: kmods and akmods. kmod packages contain binary kernel modules built for a specific version of the Linux kernel. akmod packages contain the source code of kernel modules, and bring in via dependencies the tools needed to compile them. If you have an akmod package installed, and you update the kernel, the akmod package will automatically build modules for the new kernel.

To switch to the akmod version, just run yum install akmod-VirtualBox-OSE.

That being said, just yesterday I switched to using the official YUM repository for VirtualBox from Oracle, because RPMFusion is two versions behind and I was experiencing a bug that was fixed in a newer version. That also includes a dkms package for building the kernel modules automatically on kernel update. (dkms is Debian's analog to akmod, but works fine on Fedora.) You could also switch to that if you'd like.

To remove the RPMFusion version, add Oracle's repository, and install VirtualBox, run the following commands (as root):

yum remove VirtualBox-OSE
wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo > /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo
yum install VirtualBox-4.0 dkms
service vboxdrv setup

Answer 2

Either exclude the kernel from the update, or wait until RPMFusion has released an updated package.