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Kernel upgrade

From andrew

Answered By Dan Wilder, Jim Dennis, Heather Stern

Hi,

I have recently upgraded my kernel from 2.2.12-20 to 2.2.19 & overall it is finding the new one ok. My machine is a Redhat 6.1 machine

Once you upgrade a new kernel can you simply do another make menuconfig to go through your options again.?

[Dan] Yes. It'll start with the last options you picked.

One of the bad things that happened when i was doing this upgrade was put the tarred file in my /usr/src/ directory . This is what a help page told me to do. Problem was though that when i untarred the kernel it overwrote my linux folder that was already in there. %^%$##.

What do you think ?? What do you suggest Regards...

[Dan] My byword as a sysadmin, not just in unpacking archives of any kind, is:

Look before you leap.

When upacking a tar archive, first

  tar tvzf your.archive.tgz | head -20

to see what it's going to do. If there's a directory in the way, move it.

I'm not sure why the linux kernel upacks to a "linux" directory. Most GNU software unpacks to a directory that contains a version number. In view of Linus's oft-repeated insistance that keeping the source tree in /usr/src/linux is considered harmful, I'd think he would archive, for example, 2.2.19 so that linux-2.2.19.tar.gz would unpack to a directory called linux-2.2.19.

I always rename my kernel source directory immediately after unpacking it. So the the 2.2.19 source is indeed in a directory called linux-2.2.19. Then I re-establish the symlink of /usr/src/linux -> /usr/src/linux/kernel-includes-2.2.xx

[JimD] A handy trick to resolve the case where you want to have multiple renditions if the same kernel version; and you want to avoid this sort of "unresolved module dependency" problem, is to edit the top level Makefile and add some unique string (like your initials and a number) to the "EXTRAVERSION" variable (on about the fifth line of the Makefile). This works in 2.2 and later kernels. In 2.0 and earlier you can simply add the string to the SUBLEVEL (?) variable. The kernel release code, as reported by `uname -r` is comprised of the concatenated values of the VERSION, PATCHLEVEL, SUBLEVEL, (and EXTRAVERSION, for 2.2 and later) variables. That string is used by the depmod, modprobe, and kmod/kerneld utilities to find the proper kernel directory under /lib/modules.

[Heather] We've also had a considerable discussion in past issues about whether symlinking straight into the kernel source (instead of keeping a safe copy to make glibc happy) should be Considered Harmful, or is a necessary evil: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue62/tag/4.html

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Published in issue 67 of Linux Gazette June 2001

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