Wow, the issue is fixed! Thanks all for your help!
Some of your suggestions were quite valuable as they’ve shown there was another can of worms that needs attention. So huge thanks for that.
Solution
This is quite bizarre as it doesn’t make any sense, but
removing the 6.7-rt headers package:
sudo pacman -R linux67-rt-headers
& as suggested its pacman cache (rm command for each file):
$ ls -al /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*-rt-headers*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25846946 May 23 22:33 /var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux67-rt-headers-6.7_rt6-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 438 May 23 22:33 /var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux67-rt-headers-6.7_rt6-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst.sig
has somehow solved the issue:
$ sudo mhwd-kernel -i linux66
[sudo] password for username:
:: Synchronising package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
multilib is up to date
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
Packages (1) linux66-6.6.32-1
Total Installed Size: 134.87 MiB
:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
I know for certain that the removal of these unused -rt headers (my kernel is 67, not 67-rt) solved it because I tested the issue before doing removing the headers.
Perhaps, mhwd has some logic for checking the existence of other headers & makes some decisions on what additional packages to install based on already existing headers?
That was just for you - to assure you that you indeed have that package in the cache (or not),
And that you therefore had the option to simply reinstall it.
I just said this to assure you that it was safe to remove - because it’s easily reinstalled …
no, it doesn’t - there is literally nothing in that script (it is just a shell script) that mentions kernel headers.
… mhwd-kernel doesn’t - haven’t looked at the other related mhwd-xx scripts
Yeah pardon poor clarity - wanted to quote the location you’ve shared & it poorly translated into a sentence
Yup, the cache did not have that package, but it was good to know the cache’s location to clear it for a different package.
The logs you’ve quoted didn’t show much as I haven’t installed the linux66 (I was holding off until I could resolve the issue) - so they only showed the:
which is telling that an extra package is being appended to the pacman -S linux66 by something in between.
But then I remembered @freggel.doe mentioning that mhwd-kernel install tends to append extra packages possibly based on the current package state.
So I figured that perhaps it’s the RT headers that are causing the package confusion during install.
Plus I don’t need the linux67-rt-headers as I’m not on an RT kernel anyway. So I gave it a try, and it solved the issue.
I suppose it could be that it’s not the mhwd-kernel that’s doing it, but some dependency of it instead? But from the practical test standpoint - it appears that the current packages state does have some sort of influence on the what packages you get in addition to your kernel.
It was installed for whatever reason by you explicitly via: pacman -S linux66 linux66-rt-headers
You instructed pacman
yesterday afternoon
to install linux66 and linux66-rt-headers as well in one command.
The context around these lines might give more clues as to why you did this.
There must be some sort of command translation going on. I don’t know what’s happening in between. But I can assure you, I did not use pacman for kernel installs.
I tested this yesterday.
Whenever I’d run the sudo mhwd-kernel -i linux66, the /var/log/pacman.log logs would get the:
You can see me attempting to install linux66 and linux61 and it resulting in rt header package being appended. Then you see me remove linux67-rt-headers & trying again the same install command for linux66. This time that same command results in different behind-the-scenes pacman command. Why? I don’t know.
And that’s my .zhistory for that timeframe (nothing left out):
I’m of the opinion that linux66-rt-headers where installed before that -
way before that.
Not just yesterday - your problem started before that time.
You could try sifting through /var/log/pacman.log again
using less /var/log/pacman.log
and searching for the term
or grep linux66-rt-headers /var/log/pacman.log
to see if there is more than this one match
It is not important anymore to find out how it got there, though - you got it removed.
Problem solved.
