[TriLUG] some kernel building observations

[Dan Chen]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 05:34:59AM -0500, rpjday wrote:
>   just perusing the Makefile and Configure files for building a kernel,
> and here's a few observations that people are free to either confirm or
> refute -- either way works for me.  i'm just trying to understand these
> scripts which are, IMHO, not as well written as they could be.  sigh.

Look for this to go away in 2.5 when CML2 is integrated. kbuild2.5
already does a pretty good job of de-clobbering this mess.
http://kbuild.sf.net

> "make distclean" runs "make mrproper", then also removes all .orig, .rej,
> .bak and other files.  as far as i can tell, there's no clean even more
> thorough than that.  it's worth knowing about these since red hat seems
> to ship their kernel source RPMs with some junk left over from a 
> previous build.  not serious, just an observation.

Yup. Actually blows away everything .* short of . and .. so back up your
.config too.

>   comments?

I've not used Red Hat's approach to building kernels [from src rpm] in a
while, but their additions seem pretty nice from your description. I
used to use my own hacked-up sh script to untar and apply a bunch of
patches that kernel-package (Debian's tool) used to balk on. I've since
gone back to doing all the applying manually -- every once in a while
someone in #kn will request a diff for the infamous __devexit and new
binutils dilemma (which should be fixed AnyDayNow(tm) in .18-pre1).

The one thing I like about vendor kernels over the vanilla tarballs
found on kernel.org is their being stressed quite heavily with Cerberus,
LTP, etc. One can count on Red Hat's stock kernels to take quite a
beating without heaving. The number of additional patchsets applied to
Red Hat and SuSE kernels is quite astonishing.

-- 
Dan Chen                 crimsun at email.unc.edu
GPG key:   www.unc.edu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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