Kernel build tree -- how to trim down

[Neil Cherry]

Mostafa Afgani wrote:
> On 4/9/06, Neil Cherry <ncherry at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> I haven't had a chance to look at the link yet but if you only
>> need to rebuild the modules you only need the Kernel development
>> package, if you need to turn on/off other features you need the
>> Kernel source (such as with NDISWrapper and the 4K -> 8K stack
>> change). One other thing to note, we're used to seeing the
>> kernel version (uname -r) look like this:
> 
> IMHO the steps outlined by Paul (link in earler post) are much easier
> to follow -- if you're writing a book -- you might want to have a
> look. On my first attempt at a rebuild, I had already followed roughly

Dang, his instructions are shorter than mine. I'm afraid I'm stuck with
my instructions as the chapter is done (wireless network cards). I've
got to give that a try.

> what you suggested. But this has the tendency of generating a RPM that
> is labeled 2.6.151.2054_FC5 instead of 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 -- I have no
> clue why the "-" gets dropped somewhere along the way. Funny thing is,
> the kernel still reports (uname -r) 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 -- it's just the
> rpm names (both the filename & rpmdb name) get screwed.

I ran into that also, caused me no end of confusion at first. When I
found out that it didn't affect the /boot kernel name I just accepted
it as a quirk.

> I really wish I didn't have to do all this rebuilding -- I have a wifi
> card with the rt2500 chipset. But the legacy driver (inherited from
> Ralink) does not work on SMP enabled kernels. There is a new unified
> driver in development but it still has too many problems. Since FC
> devs decided that there will be no UP kernels for AMD64 archs, I'm
> stuck with rebuilding -- just to remove that stupid SMP flag. This in
> turn means that I can no longer just get my nVidia / ntfs / lirc
> kernel modules as prepackaged rpms. I tried to rebuild the nVidia kmod
> from Livna but that apparently requires kernel-kdump-devel -- I didn't
> feel like wasting another 30 minutes rebuilding with kdump enabled in
> the spec file so I just went and grabbed the driver from nVidia
> instead. The only good thing about the rebuild was that I got to turn
> on the NTFS flag and not have to deal with yet another module to
> rebuild.

> Sorry if it seems like I'm ranting here but what can I say -- I'm
> upset, I'm very very upset.

I'm not happy about the complexity of the various things with
the kernel but I always rebuild my kernel to remove a lot of
junk I don't need. Why is the IBM RSA service process on by
default (may be a module)? Seem the dev may not know what's
going on either.

-- 
Linux Home Automation         Neil Cherry       ncherry at linuxha.com
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