[ale] SuSE 8.2, Building a kernel

[James P. Kinney III]

Hi Bruce,

You're on the right track with the basic compile stuff. If you have
everything needed to get the system to boot compiled into the kernel,
you don't need an initrd (or a mkinitrd process). It is used to load
modules into the kernel that are required for booting. Usually those are
the hard drive modules and things like RAID and LVM. 

The different distro's make their own kernels and have the binaries
ready to install. They also make their source packages available, as
well. The big guys (RedHat and Suse) have patches in the stock kernel
sources that are their to do special things. RedHat is famous
(notorious) for having heavily patched kernels that are hard to build
even from their src.rpm's! Suse is not as bad on that except for their
enterprise kernels. 

One thing you can do to make your life easier is to reuse the old
.config file when you build a new kernel. Suse puts it in the same place
it puts its kernels for booting, /boot. It will be named something like
Config-2.4.19 (it may just be named Config). Copy that to your unwrapped
source tree (from a fresh unwrapping/taretc) as .config. Then run make
oldconfig and answer the default to anything it asks (hit enter). When
it's done, run make menuconfig and examine to see if there is anything
new you gotta have:) then it's make dep, make bzImage, make modules,
make modules_install, copy over the new kernel to /boot, tweak grub,
hold your breath and reboot.

On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 23:03, BruceG wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
>       I'm trying to compile a kernel for SuSE 8.2, and need a few pointers. I 
> downloaded a clean kernel from www.kernel.org. I took the 2.4.21 kernel 
> (although 22 is now out - but I've been doing the head against the wall thing 
> for a while). I did not download patches.
> 
>       I extracted the kernel source into /usr/src/linux/2.4.21 - then 
> symlinked to /usr/src/linux. I did a make menuconfig, make dep, make bzImage, 
> make modules, make modules_install - and updated grub. 
> 
>       The boot died, I did not enable reiser support in the kernel. So built 
> again, this time forgetting FAT (for my Windows partition) - but was able to 
> boot and get a console. So - rebuilding again, making sure to include reiser, 
> fat (for Win95), my network card, usbhid support for mouse and joystick, and 
> BTTV support. I also copied my XF86Config files: 1 for compiled NVidia 
> support, and one for using the open NV drivers. Will swap XF86Config files 
> before rebooting.
> 
>       I heard about having to do a mkinitrd - how do you do that? And I'm 
> probably doing this all wrong, any simple pointers to compiling a kernel in 
> SuSE 8.2 land? And should I use a clean kernel from kernel.org, or grab one 
> from SuSE? If so, how would I do that?
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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