Gecko shows "56" virtualbox packages installed???

[esteelpaz]

@geckolinux

Hey, Happy Holidays . . . yesterday I was booted in my Gecko Plasma rolling edition distro and due to issues with grub I hadn't been able to boot it for a couple weeks and it showed "506 packages to upgrade" . . . and in there was a "virtualbox" package. I don't use vb, since I have a bunch of installs running and it seems to take a long time to install vb each time I run a zypper.

So I tried to use YaST to remove it . . . 45 mins later it was still "working on it." I quit out of it and ran a "zypper rm" on it and it showed "we will remove 56 packages" and it started working on it, taking perhaps ten minutes to remove one line item, or more??? I was going to leave and let it run, but the computer seemed to be getting "warm" while trying to do it . . . so I canceled out of it.

Question is, why are there so many older editions of VB that are left installed, why does it take so long to "install" the new editions, and why does it take so much cpu time and energy to try to remove them???? I have three Gecko installs and two regular OpenSUSE that I hit this VB problem on each time there is an upgrade, but never realized that the older versions were also left installed?????

[geckolinux]

Hey there @esteelpaz . That sounds like the virtualbox-kmp-default-* package for the VirtualBox kernel module, which needs to be compiled for each different kernel version. And yes, each version will stick around until it's explicitly removed and/or the kernel version that it was built for gets removed. (openSUSE also keeps multiple versions of previously installed kernel packages.) If you don't need VirtualBox either for the host or as a guest then you can safely remove any package with virtualbox in its name.

[esteelpaz]

@geckolinux

Alrighty . . . appreciate the reply . . . . I do see that SUSE keeps old kernels around, but they usually cut the list to three . . . . meaning that the leftover VB packages wouldn't be "needed" any longer??

And, yes, that was the "virtualbox-kmp-default" packages . . . all 56 of them. One of the apps showed "11MB will be saved" by removing the 56 packages, but doing the math on it, that would be roughly 560 minutes of cpu burn time to remove them, to save 11MB of disk space??? But, to then save the "upgrade/install" cpu time that seems to go into adding the new packages. Might be easier to "lock" the package?? Would that cause a problem for newer kernels going in in future upgrades???

Seems to take a lot of time to install and equal amounts to remove . . . ?? : - 0

[geckolinux]

I believe that the CPU time for that sort of operation is because it's regenerating the initram image. It should only need to do it once after removing however many KMP packages are being removed.

[esteelpaz]

Could be. Watching the console it was showing the item number that it was removing, like "1/56" and then "2/56" . . . and then it would show "done" and move to the next number . . . I got to "4/56" and the the heat coming off the machine was palpable from a few feet away . . . cold day and still it was "very warm" . . . .

I think I'll look into the lock on it . . . . Not using VB, etc.