[CentOS] rolling your own kernel - guidelines?

Thu Oct 4 17:12:34 UTC 2007
Ross S. W. Walker <rwalker at medallion.com>

Florin Andrei wrote:
> 
> Let's say I want to use a much newer kernel - even one from 
> the future, 
> such as the upcoming 2.6.24. :-) What would y'all smart folks 
> do in this 
> case, in order to avoid any possible nasty consequences?
> Would you import the config file from the original CentOS5 
> kernel into 
> the new kernel, and let the kernel deal with the differences? 
> I.e. have 
> the old configuration as some sort of baseline that can be 
> further tweaked.
> Or some other strategy?

Once you take the kernel off the reservation be warned that
some packages in the repository may bork:

most likely: packages that have a kernel module (drbd, etc)
moderate likelihood: low-level api packages (glibc etc)
less likely: high-level user-space apps (apache etc)

Knowing the consequences of that, then what I might do is
try to wrap my own kernel RPM spec file, remove all patches
from current one so you have the bare spec. Keep the config
files, but for new options you may get prompted during build,
so afterwards move the BUILD\kernel\... configs into the
SOURCE so the next build won't prompt you.

This way when you install it you can remove it easily and
everything is installed CentOS appropriate.

Make sense?

-Ross

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