On Tuesday, 12 October 2004 01.34, Patrick B. O'Brien wrote:
Any body ever go out to the http://www.kernel.org/ site, grab and update their kernel?
yes, I've done it once or twice
How did it go,
Sometimes well, sometimes not so well. Now that kernel.org has abandoned the "even means stable, odd means development" thing, getting vanilla kernels has become even more of a crap shoot than it was before. On production machines you should seriously consider staying with the distribution kernel, which should have received sufficient testing that you could rely on it
How did you do it?
The first time 1. unpack into a directory somewhere, I use $HOME/src/ 2. cd to the directory where you unpacked it and run "make xconfig" 3. Spend ages going through all the options, checking what you need and unchecking what you don't need for your hardware 3a. Edit the file Makefile, and put something on the EXTRAVERSION line, such as EXTRAVERSION=-pbob or something 4. exit and run "make bzImage" 5. If you chose to create modules, run "make modules" 6. If you chose to create modules, run "make modules_install" 7. Copy arch/i386/boot/bzImage to /boot 8. edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to create an entry for your new kernel. Do *not* delete your old, working entry 9. reboot 10. If it for some reason doesn't boot, find out what you forgot to include in step 3, reboot to your working kernel and redo steps 3-9 The second and future times 1. same as above 2. copy the working .config from your previous kernel to the new kernel source directory 3. run "make oldconfig". This will stop on any configuration options that wasn't in the old version, so you can decide what to do with them. This is usually only one or two new options for a new kernel, so it's manageable 4-9. same as above 10. shouldn't be necessary, but according to Murphy it's probably the same as above as well I'm sure I've forgotten something. I hope someone will correct and/or add to this if I've left something out. But this is more or less what I do and it seems to work well. Step 3 in the above is obviously the most time consuming step. You can do it the suse way, and build just about everything as modules, that will save you a lot of time and energy. But if you take the time and go through it and get the options right for your particular configuration, you will see some benefit. If nothing else, it will let you get more acquainted with the kernel and its abilities