Compiling a kernel

From Linuxintro
Revision as of 05:14, 2 February 2009 by imported>ThorstenStaerk

This is an example how to compile a Linux kernel. It has been tested for SUSE Linux 10.2 and kernel 2.6.21, but should work same or similar for every combination.

  • Make sure you have a compiler installed
yast -i gcc
  • Download the kernel from ftp.kernel.org
wget ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.21.tar.bz2
  • unpack the kernel
bunzip linux-2.6.21.tar.bz2
  • unpack the kernel for the second time
tar xvf linux-2.6.21.tar
  • configure the kernel
cd linux-2.6.21
make oldconfig
  • answer some un-understandable questions
  • compile the kernel, note: on a two-CPU VMWare virtual machine with 2.4 GHz, this lasted 19m28.605s
make -j4
  • compile the drivers
make -j4 modules
  • install the drivers
make modules_install
  • install the kernel
cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21

This will install the kernel for the x86_64 architecture.

  • prepare the initial ramdisk
mkinitrd

This will build an initial ramdisk for all kernels contained in /boot.

  • add an entry to the bootloader. Let's take grub's /boot/grub/menu.lst:
title 2.6.21-selfcompiled
   root (hd0,0)
   kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21 root=/dev/sda1
   initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21