On Friday 20 August 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
(disclaimer: i'll be a bit vague about some of this since i don't have a test system to try to reproduce it until later today or this weekend.)
during a RHEL SA course i was teaching this week, i was using both centos 5.5 and RHEL 6.0 beta 2 and, as a fun exercise, i was showing how to "git" checkout the kernel source tree, configure it, build, install and boot to a new kernel.
Rolling your own kernel is really considered a last resort on CentOS/RHEL. It seems like a strange exercise to select for an RHEL SA course (IMHO). If you really want/need to do this then reading through http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Custom_Kernel may be a good idea.
sadly, at no time did that exercise actually work, so i just want to ask a general question -- should i, with a standard install of centos 5.5 with all of the required development packages, be able to checkout the kernel source, and build and boot a new kernel?
If done properly, yes. However it's not like just any git-checked-out kernel+config will make you happy.
upon reflection, the issues might have to do with the fact that LVM was in use and perhaps the initrd didn't have LVM support built in but, again, i can't check that until later today at the earliest.
...
LVM will be automatically added to the initrd by mkinitrd (assuming the kernel it tries to use has the required modules).
/Peter