Re: Aunt Tillie builds a kernel (was Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution)

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002 [e-mail] wrote:

> In article <[e-mail]> you wrote:
> 
> Ok I shouldn't but...
> 
> > RedHat 7 is a prime example. I put it on a box in the other room.
> > /usr/src didn't contain ANYTHING after an installation.
> > However, /usr/include/asm and /usr/include/linux existed, not
> > as symlinks, but as files that would-have-existed within a
> > kernel distribution. 
> 
> Exactly and 100% correct. Those are GLIBC headers and have NOTHING to do
> with the kerenl.
> 
> > So... I did RPM install for the kernel after I found what was
> 
> Well you should have installed the kernel-source rpm if you wanted the full
> expanded source... we make that one for a reason you know...
> 
> > alleged to have been the kernel. Now I had a /usr/src/linux/..., but
> 
> > The usr/src/linux/.config was the .config obtained off from Linus`
> > tree, not something provided by RedHat so `make oldconfig` would have
> > made a "standard kernel" like you download from ftp.kernel.org.
> 
> Ehm yes it does if you use the kernel-source RPM, also we ship about a dozen
> different configs (differing in cpu type and up/smp mostly), ALL those
> .config files are neatly available in the configs/ subdirectory.
> 
> > Now, looking in /usr/src/redhat/../.., I find some patches that are
> > impossible to use to patch the kernel to bring it up (or down) to
> > the configuration used to build the distribution. The default
> > configuration, before I "installed" the kernel sources was some
> > empty directories of /usr/src/redhat/BUILD, /usr/src/redhat/RPMS,
> > /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES, /usr/src/redhat/SPECS, and /usr/src/redhat/SRPMS.
> > Now there were some patches and other files with no scripts
> 
> Ehm the .spec file is the script!
> rpm -bp kernel-2.2.spec to "run" it to create a source, or rpm -bb to make
> rpm -i'able rpm binaries files from it.
> 
> > and no
> > way to actually use them to modify the kernel. I spent hours, putting
> > them in order, based upon the time/date stamp within the files, not
> > the file time which was something more or less random. I made a script
> > and tried, over a period of weeks, to patch the supplied kernel with
> > the supplied patches. Forget it. If anything in this universe is truly
> > impossible, then making a Red Hat distribution kernel from the provided
> > tools, patches, and sources is a definitive example.
> 
> Ok now you offend me. I spent quite a bit of time making the .spec file easy
> to read, AND we provide a convenient kernel-source rpm which installs
> /usr/src/linux (for RHL7.0) or /usr/src/linux-2.4 for 2.4 kernels (7.1/7.2) 
> which contains the full source AND all configs we used. AND if you type
> "make oldconfig" it picks the one you are currently running. Heck I even put
> a (ok partial) description of each patch (in addition to the brief
> description in the spec file) for the 7.1 kernel on
> http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/patches.html for people who were interested
> in why a patch existed.
> 
> Now what more would you want ?  
> 
> Greetings,
>    Arjan van de Ven
>    Red Hat Linux kernel maintainer
>    
> 

Well you SHOULD and you did. I want to thank you for your definitive
explaination of how to make a kernel that is an exact functional
duplicate of the distributed kernel. Hopefully this will work, and I
will, in fact, make it worth your company's time by getting the
"latest-and-greatest" Red Hat distribution and use your Email as
a reference.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.1 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).

    I was going to compile a list of innovations that could be
    attributed to Microsoft. Once I realized that Ctrl-Alt-Del
    was handled in the BIOS, I found that there aren't any.