Subject: Re: Please help me figure this kernel stuff out!!
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Sep 27 2001 - 23:27:45 MDT
At 9:08 PM -0500 9/27/01, Kitt Thompson wrote:
>Thanks for the quick replies concerning my kernel building plea
>for help. It appears it is far more involved than I had anticipated.
>For example, I figured it would be safe to nab the latest source
>from kernel.org for the build. But this might not be a wise choice for the
>PPC crowd.
Correct. Although every so often the PPC developers merge work into
the official trees and you get a particular source tree from
kernel.org that will build cleanly on PPC. And while I haven't built
a 2.2.x series kernel since 2.2.18, 2.2.x as of then had gotten to
the point where just about every official release was fine for PPC
use (2.2.x has reached a state of fairly stable development where
most of what's going on is bugfixes and addition of new drivers).
>Also, I have been told that I should use "make vmlinux", since I am
>using BootX, to build the kernel uncompressed, yet the email instructions
>quoted below show a "make" instead. Which one should I use?
Doesn't matter. "make" without a target builds vmlinux by default.
>Thirdly, in searching for kernel souce, I have noticed kernel headers and
>kernal doc tar balls in with the source tar balls. Would I need the headers
>and docs for a kernel build?
No. The headers are for people who don't want to have kernel source
lying around but do want to build software that expects to include
headers from the kernel. The headers are just a subset of the full
kernel source and are usually put under /usr/src/linux (or a similar
directory with /usr/src/linux being a symlink pointing at the actual
directory).
Such packages shouldn't be necessary, because it's supposed to be
officially Not A Good Idea for user space programs to use kernel
headers. However, enough of them do require kernel headers that the
distributions generally have kernel header packages for those who
don't want the burden of a full kernel source tree lying around.
Docs aren't needed unless you need to read them. :) The build
process couldn't care less whether they're present.
Another thing: despite what many guides will tell you, you do not
have to build kernels while logged in as root with the kernel source
tree in /usr/src/linux. You can unpack the kernel source in a
regular user's home directory and build it as that user with no
problems. You only have to be root to install the modules and the
kernel after they've been built. The advantage of this technique is
that you can leave package-controlled files under /usr/src alone.
(If /usr/src/linux absolutely needs to be your current kernel, just
symlink it to wherever your build directory is.)
>*whew* Ok, I guess my first question will be, where should I go to get
>source for a build?
Depends on what you want to do. www.ppckernel.org may be helpful
although it looks like their information is out of date in some
places (BitKeeper trees).
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu Sep 27 2001 - 22:37:37 MDT