Newbie kernel building questions

[Andrew Robinson <awrobinson@xxxxxxx>]

I'm trying to teach myself how to build a kernel. As a first attempt, I 
figured I'd try to recreate the kernel I downloaded from Red Hat. The 
guide I'm using on how to accomplish this is "Linux Administrtion, A 
Beginner's Guide, Second Edition". The proceedure Shah gives is boiled
down to this:

1. Copy kernel source directory:
    cd /usr/src
    cp -rp linux-2.4.20-19.9 linux-2.4.20-19.9-awr1
    rm linux-2.4
    ln -s linux-2.4.20-19.9-awr1 linux-2.4
2. Determine current hardware setup
    cat /proc/pci
3. Configure the kernel
    cd linux-2.4
    make xconfig
4. Compile the kernel
    make dep
    make clean
    make zImage | make bzImage
    make modules
5. Install the kernel
    cp /usr/src/linux-2.4/arch/i386/boot/zImage 
/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-19.9-awr1
    cp /usr/src/linux-2.4/System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.20-19.9-awr1
6. install the modules
    make modules_install
7. Add the kernel to /boot/grub/grub.conf

On my first attempt, I made no changes in "make xconfig". When the 
window came up, I clicked on "Save and Exit".

The first problem I encountered was with "make zImage". The make failed 
with the message "System is too big. Try using bzImage or modules." I 
then ran "make clean; make bzImage". That succeeded, but resulting 
kernel was larger than the production one. That leads to the first 
observation, that the starting configuraton in "make xconfig" is not the 
same as the binary kernel distributed with the same version number. Is 
that a correct observation? Is there a way to determine what the 
configuration is for the binary kernel?

The second observation is that there are more files in /boot tied by 
version number than my proceedure accounts for. In my current /boot
directory, I have

config-2.4.20-19.9
module-info-2.4.20-19.9
System.map-2.4.20-19.9
vmlinux-2.4.20-19.9
vmlinuz-2.4.20-19.9

My proceedure only mentions vminuz and System.map. I assume this means 
my proceedure is lacking. Can someone point me to a better proceedure 
for building kernels?

After running "make bzImage", I tried "make install". This did put a 
copy of the new kernel in /boot. However, I wasn't sure it did 
everything it needed to or did them all correctly. Does "make install" 
work when building a kernel?

I plowed ahead, added the new kernel to grub.conf and tried booting with 
it. It failed. However, I decided not to get to excited until I had 
these other issues worked out.

One last thing (perhaps). In grub.conf, there is a reference to 
initrd-<version>. I remember seeing a discussion a while back on this 
file but I do not recall any details. Could someone point me to an 
explanation of that?

Thanks!

Andrew Robinson




--
Shrike-list mailing list
Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list