Re: kernel hcking

[John Bradford]

> I'm a kernel newbie and just wanted to know what do most kernel hackers do
> when working on the kernel say 2.5 when you make changes do u need to
> recompile the kernel and reboot the machine to test your small modification
> or do people use something like bochs.

A lot of developers have multiple physical machines, which makes
testing various different kernels a lot easier.

> Also every time you makes changes in the kernel it must be hell to
> recompile the whole thing

If you are testing kernels on a separate machine to the one you are
compiling on, and therefore not rebooting, it's not much of a problem
- with enough RAM, most or all of the kernel source will be cached,
and you can compile a kernel in three to five minutes on a fast
machine.

John.