On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 15:48, Stephen Hassard wrote: > Something that helps to is to never remove your known working kernel > entry from your bootloader, and make your new kernel the secondary > manually selected kernel on your first boot. This way if your kernel is > hosed for some reason, you should always be able to recover your system > with minimal pain by rebooting into your default working kernel. > > later, > Steve > > Andrew Dahlin wrote: > > honestly, compiling a kernel is trivial once you build one successfully. > the first time will take a few hours to get it right (tops), but by the time > you're done, you know exactly what you're doing. i can configure a kernel > from scratch in about 20 minutes... and i'm not a hacker or anything... i > just know what i need. i'm not saying everyone should build their own > kernel, but if you install your distro's sources (with their .config), it's > fairly risk free. just back up your old kernel. [OT: if you run lilo, don't > forget to run lilo after copying over the new kernel. TONS of people don't > realize this their first time] > > 99% of the time, if you compile a new kernel and it won't boot, it's because you forgot to enable some driver that's required to boot your machine. So, using the vendor's .config is a pretty good way to ensure that if your old kernel worked, the new one will. Actually, now there's an even better way. I think this feature is only available on 2.6 kernels. The .config used to compile the running kernel is available in /proc/config.gz, so you can do: zcat /proc/config.gz > .config and be pretty much guaranteed to get the exact same working config that you have running. Of course it's still a good idea to keep the old kernel accessible. But you can reduce your failure rate to almost zero. Lee
