A recent kernel change has change the behavior of chmod on fat filesystems:
commit 19c561a60ffe52df88dd63de0bff480ca094efe4 Author: Jan Engelhardt jengelh@computergmbh.de Date: Wed Feb 6 01:36:08 2008 -0800
fs/fat/: refine chmod checks
After this change rpm installs of kernels fail on ia64. This is because efi systems use vfat for the boot filesystem. RPM installs fail because cpio gets a error on chmod (before this kernel change it would fail silently).
My suggestion was to have anaconda set the "quiet" option (which makes chmod failures silent) for /boot/efi in fstab however they disagree (see BZ 435319).
So, it seems like the options are: revert the patch (probably not a good idea) make "quiet" the default for fat filesystems, or, convince anaconda to add "quiet" to the fstab. Or, hopefully someone else has a better idea.
thanks,
- Doug