These days Fedora uses DNF as its high(er) level package management software, replacing yum. However, there are multiple versions of DNF, which behave somewhat differently. Through Fedora 40, the default version of DNF was DNF 4; in Fedora 41, DNF is now DNF 5. DNF 5 brings a number of improvements but it has at least one issue that makes me unhappy with it in my specific situation. Over on the Fediverse I said:

Oh nice, DNF 5 in Fedora 41 has nicely improved the handling of output from RPM scriptlets, so that you can more easily see that it's scriptlet output instead of DNF messages.

[later]

I must retract my praise for DNF 5 in Fedora 41, because it has actually made the handling of output from RPM scriptlets *much* worse than in dnf 4. DNF 5 will repeatedly re-print the current output to date of scriptlets every time it updates a progress indicator of, for example, removing packages. This results in a flood of output for DKMS module builds during kernel updates. Dnf 5's cure is far worse than the disease, and there's no way to disable it.

<bugzilla 2331691>

(Fedora 41 specifically has dnf5-5.2.8.1, at least at the moment.)

This can be mostly worked around for kernel package upgrades and DKMS modules by manually removing and upgrading packages before the main kernel upgrade. You want to do this so that dnf is removing as few packages as possible while your DKMS modules are rebuilding. This is done with:

1. Upgrade all of your non-kernel packages first:

   dnf upgrade --exclude 'kernel*'
   

2. Remove the following packages for the old kernel:

   kernel kernel-core kernel-devel kernel-modules kernel-modules-core kernel-modules-extra

   (It's probably easier to do 'dnf remove kernel*<version>*' and let DNF sort it out.)

3. Upgrade two kernel packages that you can do in advance:

   dnf upgrade kernel-tools kernel-tools-libs
   

Unfortunately in Fedora 41 this still leaves you with one RPM package that you can't upgrade in advance and that will be removed while your DKMS module is rebuilding, namely 'kernel-devel-matched'. To add extra annoyance, this is a virtual package that contains no files, and you can't remove it because a lot of things depend on it.

As far as I can tell, DNF 5 has absolutely no way to shut off its progress bars. It completely ignores $TERM and I can't see anything else that leaves DNF usable. It would have been nice to have some command line switches to control this, but it seems pretty clear that this wasn't high on the DNF 5 road map.

(Although I don't expect this to be fixed in Fedora 41 over its lifetime, I am still deferring the Fedora 41 upgrades of my work and home desktops for as long as possible to minimize the amount of DNF 5 irritation I have to deal with.)