Vanilla 3.2 kernel Build Install

[AndrewSerk]

Vanilla 3.2 kernel build/install

There has been a lot of talk about the 3.2 kernel's new functions and hardware support. I fell victim to the chit chat and decided to give the 3.2 kernel a try. This may not be the most efficient way to get 3.2 going on your system but it is the method that I used.

First thing I did was install the packages necessary to do the build, add user mockbuild and setup the build environment .

CODE

su -c 'yum install rpmdevtools yum-utils gcc ncurses-devel mock make;adduser mockbuild'

CODE

rpmdev-setuptree

I then pointed my browser to kernel.org and downloaded the source linux-3.2.tar.bz2 . I also downloaded the 3.2 kernel srpm from koji.fedoraproject.org . (I built the one from kernel.org and used the srpm from koji to build the deps.)

The next step is to build/install the dependencies. From a terminal cd to the location that you downloaded the 3.2 kernel.srpm from koji and run:

CODE

su -c 'yum-builddep kernel-3.2*.src.rpm'

When the above has completed you should have all the dependencies installed necessary for the build. The next step is to extract the linux-3.2.tar.bz2 that was downloaded from kernel.org. I downloaded the tar.bz2 to my downloads folder so I just browsed nautilus to Downloads, right mouse clicked the tar.bz2 and choose “extract here”. That created a new folder/directory in Downloads with the name linux-3.2 . From a terminal, cd to the new directory/folder linux-3.2 and run the following, one command at a time:

CODE

make mrproper make menuconfig make su -c 'make modules_install install' make rpm

The new kernel.rpm will be wrote to a subfolder in your /home/username/rpmbuild/RPMS/ . (The exact location will be shown in the last few lines of output from the make rpm command.) In a terminal cd to the location of the new kernel.rpm and run:

CODE

su -c 'yum localinstall –nogpgcheck kernel-*'

In order to have your machine boot the new kernel without interaction from a user I had to change “default=1” to “default=0” in /boot/grub/grug.conf after this install or you can just choose what kernel you want to boot from the boot menu countdown.

Reboot

Hope this helps someone

[RalphEllis]

As an experiment, I recently tried the 3.2.5 vanilla kernel from ELREPO. The big advantage was faster disk access on an XFS formatted hard disk. I did have to recompile and install my ATI video drivers using the ATI supplied driver and script but this was not unexpected. For some reason the binary drivers from the repository were not performing well. But building a distribution specific package and reinstalling using yum and amdconfig --initial solved the problem.

For some reason my task selector on the Gnome panel had to be reinstalled.

The only strong reasons that people should consider the 3.2.5 kernel are:
Faster speeds with XFS
Better power management especially with laptops
If you have very new hardware that the RHEL kernel may not fully support yet.

Memory use seemed to be a bit less but this is not significant for me since my computer has 8 Gig of memory.

Otherwise, the SL 6.1 setup works just fine in its stock format.

[zwiebacksaege]

Hej there,

thanks very much for this really nice and noob-friendly guide... did it with the 3.3.8 Kernel with immediate success.. one Question: why are you doing the rpm build and the install of the rpm? As far as I read in other guides the make modules_install install already puts it to the system, not?

[AndrewSerk]

Hello zwiebacksaege and welcome to SLF

Glad you found this guide useful.
If I remember correctly the reason I choose to make and install the rpm had something to do with the ability to have the oldest kernel automatically removed when installing a new kernel. I don't remember the exact details but hope that helps give you some idea.


Hope this helps,