I just ran -Su / system update on a virgin image ("Don't Panic") and it resulted in FATAL: kernel too old errors during the upgrade and ultimately rendered it totally hosed and unbootable.

A system update of my current working Arch linode ("Core Dump") completed successfully last week, so I think it has to do with xen running the 2.6.18 kernel. Lucky I upgraded just before migrating.... (yet it still works... perhaps this is a problem when building packages).

Anyway I wouldn't run a system upgrade on arch under xen unless you are positive you know what you're doing.

what host are you on, and what versions of libc6 (called glibc-solibs on slackware) both before and after the upgrade?

glibc 2.7-7 (same on both my linodes, one was upgraded to the latest version of arch before migrating, the other is just the image linode provides).

dallas60 but all xen hosts have the same kernel afaik.

any chance linode can confirm or deny whether arch linux latest release/pacman is compatible with the xen beta?

At the moment it would appear that running a system upgrade = catastrophic failure.

I deployed the base Arch image on a Xen host and performed a system update without any issues. I ran it two or three times until I finally received:

[root@none etc]# pacman -Syu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 local database is up to date
[root@none etc]#

I think you must have deployed and upgraded Arch before you migrated to Xen and hit this issue , which is now resolved.

As Tom stated, we were able to deploy and upgrade Arch on Xen Linodes just fine.

Mystery solved?
-Chris

Yes, working now. But at the time of the original post I deployed the base image from scratch three times on a xen host, went straight to -Syu, and it failed each time with kernel too old errors.

I specifically waited for the xen upgrade before creating the image to save having to wait for the data transfer.

The Maintenance/Reboot: dallas59 & atlanta34 post appears to explain the issue, although I'm on dallas60 (pretty sure it was dalas59 prior to the xen upgrade) so I'm not 100%... It would be a concern because it's probably quite costly to recover an unbootable linode. I'm not in a hurry to -Su my other linode without taking a backup, it was actually migrated to xen wholesale and I've not attempted to update it yet on its new host.

But, yes, the installation on the host in question is now updating just fine.