Yes. I have it set up this way. I forgot it wasn’t the default. For the amount of headache it would solve, I wonder if the Arch team has a specific reason for not keeping a number of previous kernels by default.

I haven’t used Windows since Win7 - Is it possible nowadays to immediately cancel a kernel-level upgrade (say, Win7 to Win8) and have it gracefully stop and then boot into the pre-upgrade environment? If so, then Windows has come a long way. We use to be careful breathing-too-loudly around Windows computers during the upgrade process. Microsoft must be getting better.

Out of curiosity: Which operating system(s) can you shutdown while the kernel is being overwritten? I wouldn’t imagine that as a limitation of Arch Linux specifically.