Re: moving up to 2.5 kernels

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday mindspring com>]

On 30 Jun 2003, Mike Chambers wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 11:42, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >   
> 
> > just for anyone who needs all the details (step by step), here's
> > what it takes to play with the latest 2.5 kernels (at least on 
> > red hat 9).
> > 
> > 1) upgrade to the latest red hat rawhide versions of both the
> >    modutils and mkinitrd RPMs.  you *need* the latest modutils RPM
> >    to understand the 2.5 kernel, but that RPM is backward-compatible
> >    if you want to reboot back to 2.4.  (when, oh when, is red hat
> >    finally going to get a grip and have the URL rawhide.redhat.com
> >    take one *directly* to the rawhide repository?  sigh.)
> > 
> > 2) get latest kernel tarball (2.5.73 at last glance) from www.kernel.org
> >    or ftp.kernel.org, and unload it under /usr/src.  there is no need to
> >    mess with symlinks, as the tarballs from kernel.org automatically 
> >    unload into the appropriate directory name (linux-2.5.73).
> > 
> > 3) in order to be *really* up to date, grab the latest BK patch from
> >    kernel.org, and patch.
> 
> In other words..
> 
> make mrproper
> copy over config or use new one
> make oldconfig/menuconfig/xconfig
> make bzImage install modules modules_install
> mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.5.73.img 2.5.73

yup, except that i don't "make install", i just do the copy
myself.  so, in a nutshell, except for the need to upgrade modutils
and mkinitrd, no big surprises.
 
> You left out make dep, is that not required now?

not any more.
 
> Note: unless it changed in 2.5/2.6, make install does the copying for
> you AND edits grub.conf as well.

it's certainly possible to automate parts of what i wrote, i thought it
would be more helpful to show the underlying steps so that, if something
goes wrong, people will have a better idea of what to look for.

rday

p.s.

the new makefile also supports some interesting testing targets,
such as:

  # make allyesconfig
  # make allnoconfig
  # make allmodconfig
  # make randconfig	(WTF ???)

on top of that, you can see the latest stability results of each
release of the 2.5 kernel at

  www.osdl.org/archive/cherry/stability

i took a chance and moved up to 2.5 a couple months ago.  never had
any need to back off since.