Re: What are the possible consequences of building a custom kernel?

[Nathan Nutter <iam@nnutter.com>]

Kyle,

Thank you for the response. The detail is appreciated, I think the
particular areas that will be helpful is the info regarding creating
an initrd. I suspect that is required for Plymouth but not yet
certain.

Thank you,
Nathan Nutter

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Kyle Pointer <glaukommatos@gmail.com> wrote:
> All sorts of stuff can break fairly easily if you're not careful when building your own kernel... but luckily, if you follow a few basic guidelines it actually doesn't have to be a huge ordeal.
>
> For the most part, the default kernel configuration is sane enough that I'd say 95% of stuff pretty much always works out of the box.
>
> The only real issue when building your own kernel will likely be one of two things: device drivers, or your initrd if you use one.
>
> So... once you download your linux-2.6.(etc)...tar.gz and extract it somewhere, you'll cd into that directory and run $ make menuconfig and that'll give you a big sexy list of option to enable/disable.
>
> Device drivers are a fairly easy thing to set up right.... mostly, as long as you know what's in your system you just go through the list of drivers and enable what you need. Big things, like USB mass storage, and device drivers that are very common (stuff you'd see on any modern pc, vs stuff that might be specific to your own pc) are typically enabled by default. So, if you see more than one option for USB mass storage devices, you're often well off to leave the default one enabled.
>
> The other common ordeal is getting your initrd set up. But luckily, Fedora actually has a set of utilities that can take most of the work out of this and simplify your life. It's been a long time since I've built my own kernel on a Fedora system, but I'm fairly certain there's a mkinitrd command specifically for this... and for further reading, you might check out this here :  http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_fedora .
>
> And last of all, if you want to build basically the exact same kernel that Fedora uses by default, but you just want to add one one or two patches, or enable/disable just a few specific modules/drivers/etc then you can copy the kernel's build configuration file out of your boot partition. It will probably be called something like /boot/config-2.6.(numbers).(etc) and call it .config in your kernel source directory, then run $ make oldconfig and then run $ make menuconfig to actually mess with the options.
>
> Anyhow, it's really not a huge deal... just be prepared to have a bunch of stuff broken the first time you try to boot it, and make sure you save a working kernel to boot from when you go to fix it. :)
>
> Sorry if I bored you with any details that were obvious.
>
> -- kyle pointer
>
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 4, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Nathan Nutter wrote:
>
>> I tend to use Ubuntu but have become frustrated with the lack of
>> communication on bug reports. I am thinking of switching to Fedora
>> long enough to either find out its not a unique problem to
>> Ubuntu/Canonical or to be amazed.
>>
>> My problem is that I have a touchscreen netbook and the touchscreen
>> works in kernel >=2.6.34 but suspend/resume tends to only work in
>> <2.6.34. I found a 2.6.34 kernel in the Arch User Repository that is
>> custom built for netbook and supports both, at the same time!
>>
>> I would like to basically build this kernel for Fedora (or maybe even
>> Ubuntu) but I am wondering what else might break. For instance, would
>> it be easy to keep Plymouth (pretty boot) with a custom kernel or is
>> there some magic that happens to get that to work? Alternatively, does
>> anyone know of a repo for either Fedora or Ubuntu that builds custom
>> netbook kernels already?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Nathan Nutter
>>
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