Fedora Core V Kernel Build - two questions for you guys

[Chelu]

Hi everyone

I have a FC5 distro and i would like to build a custom kernel. Not for a specific purpose, but for gain some experience.

So, I have a few questions for you guys.

1. What rpms do I need to have? And where should I copy them? (please provide a link if possible. It would be too great).

2. What are the commands that should i run?

Thanks in advance,

your friend Chelu.

[Seve]

Hello:
If you do a quick look through the how-to section here on the forums there are several very good how-to's which you can follow.
Here are a few:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=141782
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=29434
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...&highlight=bob

Seve

[lmo]

Since you said:

Not for a specific purpose, but for gain some experience.

Here is the way I have been building vanilla kernels from kernel.org. Every unique new kernel build results in a system that is over 1/2 GB larger. The kernel build takes 1-2 hours on my PIII 800.

This is a script I called KMAKE which I put in /root/ which is root's home directory.

Note: replace linux-X.X.X with the real name, e.g., linux-2.6.21

Must manually do the steps up to and including:
make menuconfig

Then, from /usr/src/linux-X.X.X, I either do:
~/KMAKE

or do the steps manually one by one.

The lines beginning with # are comments and are steps that I run before/after the compilation steps.

# Here, I violate everybody else's idea, but it works for me (I don't fear root)

#Download vanilla sources from www.kernel.org (get the .bz2 -- more compressed)

#Become root with:
#su -

#Copy the downloaded linux-X.X.X.tar.bz2 to /usr/src/
#cd /usr/src/
#tar -xjf linux-X.X.X.tar.bz2
#cd linux-X.X.X

#NOTE: Not use the exact name of "/usr/src/linux" because that historically conflicts

#copy in a .config from a working kernel

#make menuconfig

#compile and make modules with this command (to avoid waiting on each step)

date > World.log && make bzImage >> World.log 2>&1 \
&&  make modules >> World.log 2>&1 \
&& make modules_install >> World.log 2>&1 && date >> World.log

#... check progress now and then from another terminal with tail -f World.log 

if [ -f arch/i386/boot/bzImage ]
then
  VERSION=$(grep "Linux kernel version:" .config | sed "s/^[^0-9]*//")
  read -p "VERSION: [$VERSION]" VERSION_Q
  if [ -n "$VERSION_Q" ]
  then
    VERSION=$VERSION_Q
  fi
  echo "VERSION: $VERSION"
  read -p "OK? " ubok
  if [ "$ubok" = "y" ]
  then
    #I have seen other people say 'make install' instead of these next steps,
    # but I haven't tried that.
    mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-${VERSION}.img $VERSION
    cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-$VERSION
    cp System.map /boot/System.map-$VERSION
    ls -lt /boot | sed 4q 2>&1 >> World.log
  fi
fi

#Remove 1+- GB of interim work files that will never again be used: 
#cd /usr/src/linux-X.X.X
#make clean

Now, one more step is to edit grub to put the new kernel as an option.

Then, after booting into the new kernel, if there are any custom modules you have made, they must be recompiled to the new kernel to use them.
2 examples of modules I have to remake are the martian modem driver and the kqemu module for qemu virtualizaion.