Howto: Debian Linux Kernel Compilation, Part 4

Fourth video of the four part series about kernel compilation.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• howto
• linux
• kernel
• compile
• debian
• computer
• vmlinuz
• nanosleep
• igneous
• part4

[Estaloca]

You forgot 1 thing till now,

If you havent initrd package on your box, try this: apt-get install initrd-tools ;) then you can do it like @ the vid! nice vids and tnx for the info ;)

[igneousphantom]

I believe yaird is essentially the same as initramfs tools (except, yaird produces a much smaller ramdisk by default). It will create an initrd image, just like initramfs-tools. I've found yaird is a bit quicker, and easier to use, and make-kpkg (when passed the --initrd option) works with yaird as well.

The only bad thing about yaird is it doesn't work as well with non-intel/amd64 processor archs.

Thanks for the comment.

[redoscar3]

Nice series. Hopefully I can put this to use on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon system. I'm not sure my current kernel is optimized for the installed Athlon XP processor, plus, I can't use the newest kernel from the Ubuntu repository because it didn't support Virtual Box OSE. uname -r = 2.6.22-14-generic. Do you have any thoughts on this? Thanks!

[igneousphantom]

To be completely honest, I've never touched virtualbox. However, one thing I can say, is that if Virtualbox uses a kernel module to do it's virtualization (kinda like kvm?), you're going to have to compile virtualbox after you've compiled your kernel, so it uses your most recent headers.

If all else fails, try checking out from their svn repo instead of grabbing one of their prepackaged versions. Normally, developer versions are a little less stable, but have support for more recent stuff.

[zaphod10]

Great video...

I just installed the 2.6.32-rc1 kernel. I didn't find any patch from Andrew Norton for this release though.

I did have one problem, I kept getting and error when I tried using the "mkinitrd.yaird' command. I checked the comments above and tried the "mkinitramfs" command instead. It worked and i was able to create and initrd and boot into the kernel.

how about a video about installing compiz?

One comment, your voice is a little soft on the videos and it's hard to hear what you say.

[Programmer780]

Thank you for saying that Igneous. I finally found out why yaird was giving me that error. I am on an AMD64 system so it didn't work. You also convinced me to switch to Reiserfs. Thanks.

[Programmer780]

Update: I have now built 2.6.30-rc8 but still kept the 2.6.29.4 kernel so I have like 5 kernels now (kinda odd I know) anyway just wanted to say thank you for helping me out.

[Programmer780]

THANK YOU! I just built a custom 2.6.29.4 kernel with custom append. After three or four tries, I figured out the problem was that I was on AMD64 and I kept getting errors on yaird so I had to use mkinitramfs. But other than that, it was successful.

[pampos123]

nice video btw:) it work:)

in future can you upload video with Linux-image-vserver-686 and multi kernels:P i try on debian this vserver but i fail!

[redoscar3]

I'm pretty sure that a kernel module is used. When I enter the command lsmod | grep "box", I get vboxdrv as a loaded module. I don't doubt I need to figure out how to compile VirtualBox for any new kernel I might come up with. Just another thing I need to learn before I get brave enough to actually try to pull something like this off. When I get things working well, I hate to mess around too much and muck things up. And this Gutsy install is the best I have every had so far. Thanks again!