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When I update my RHEL with yum update commend, it list all update packages, and after I hit Y for yes, got following response.

    Running rpm_check_debug
    Running Transaction Test
    Transaction Test Succeeded
    Running Transaction
    Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum.
    Killed
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  • 1
    Someone or something killed yum. Take a look at your free memory, maybe you hit an OOM condition, and it's not scored well enough by the OOM killer.
    – Chris Down
    Commented Oct 29, 2013 at 10:42
  • Had a similar issue with yum in centos 7, yum history sync worked for me.
    – arupgsh
    Commented Oct 26, 2022 at 19:07

2 Answers 2

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This may not be a serious issue at all, see here:

The yum message "Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum." [...] means some application has altered the rpm database (installed or removed a package) without going through the Yum APIs. This is almost always due to someone using rpm directly (Ie. rpm -ivh blah.rpm), but another possibility is an application built on top of the rpm APIs (Ie. smart, apt, zypp).

So it may have been something you did inadvertently, or some piece of software did. Hopefully it is not a big deal and can be resolved with:

yum clean all

Have a look at CLEAN OPTIONS in man yum to understand what that does. Basically it gets rid of any locally cached data to do with RPMDB; normally this is used to speed up transactions, so next time you run yum it will probably take a little bit longer because it needs to replace the (corrupted) data you just cleaned out.

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  • Mmm... do this message cause yum to get killed? Maybe a bug?
    – Braiam
    Commented Oct 11, 2014 at 0:37
  • @Braiam : I haven't tried to replicate it but I think I've encountered it before, and there are problems like this that will cause yum to bail. It seems more like a safety feature than a bug.
    – goldilocks
    Commented Oct 14, 2014 at 12:27
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Although this is an old topic, the issue sometimes still exists.

What I've ran into was that the system hadn't got enough RAM to process the update so eventually it got killed.

The solution was to create a swapfile on disk, not the fastes but it works:

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
chmod 0600 /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

After this the update would work just fine.

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