Pix Galore: Compiling Linux Kernel 2.6.38

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Let's compile a Linux kernel. To build a kernel, I installed the following packages:

libglade2-dev is needed to configure the kernel by running “make gconfig”. In addition, I am going to include the following features.

unionfs is a union filesystem that allows me to merge several filesystems into a single logical one. It has several uses, such as Live CD's and modifiable read-only filesystem.
ndiswrapper allows me to use many network devices by installing native Windows drivers.

I downloaded the kernel source and unpacked it.

tar xjvf linux-2.6.38.tar.bz2
cd linux-2.6.38

Then, I applied the unionfs patch.

gzip -dc ../unionfs-2.5.3_for_2.6.18.8.diff.gz | patch -p1 -l

Then, I configured the kernel with a GTK configuration tool.

cp /boot/config-2.6.31.5 .config
make gconfig

Open Makefile with an editor and define EXTRAVERSION if necessary.

Now let's compile the kernel.

make bzImage
make install
make modules
make modules_install
depmod -e -F /boot/System.map-2.6.38 -m 2.6.38

Set the default root device and ramdisk size for the new kernel.

cd /boot
rdev vmlinuz-2.6.38 1,0
ramsize vmlinuz-2.6.38 4096

Finally, compile ndiswrapper (Patches available here).

tar xzf ndiswrapper-1.55.tar.gz
cd ndiswrapper-1.55
KVERS=2.6.31.6 make uninstall
KVERS=2.6.31.6 make
KVERS=2.6.31.6 make install

Generate modules.* files.

depmod -e -m -F /boot/System.map-2.6.31.6 2.6.31.6

Pix Galore