How to compile a kernel for Ubuntu Karmic

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Ubuntu Karmic has been released to the public a few days ago and it’s time to write up a How To Compile a Kernel article. Only a few small changes have been made to the way we have compile a kernel for Ubuntu Karmic compared to Ubuntu Jaunty but they are significant enough for it’s own how-to.

I wrote this how to because my laptop has 4GB of internal memory and with the default kernel that ships with Ubuntu Karmic the entire 4GB is not addressed.

Lets get started building our own custom kernel for Ubuntu Karmic from scratch.

Updates

November 13, 2009: Compilation: The NOEXTRAS is no longer used . CONCURRENCY_LEVEL is automatically determined in the rules files.
November 10, 2009 : Changed the installation command. Thanks to comment by HotShotDJ
November 8, 2009 : Typo in the installing the kernel section. Only the headers were installed, not the image.

I wrote the follow up article: How to update your custom Ubuntu Karmic kernel after a new kernel release

Introduction

git
I’ll be using git to get the latest kernel version. This is my favorite way to get the sources and it is in my opinion the fastest way to make changes later on when you want to update your own kernel to the latest version.
I suggest adding my Launchpad repository to your system. The repository holds the latest version of git and is usually updated within a day of a new release of git, follow the instructions on the page Git Packages for Ubuntu to add my repository.

Arch
I am compiling the i386 version, if you want to compile for amd64 you need replace i386 for amd64 throughout this article.

Flavor
I choose the name core2 as the flavor name as for my personal use I’ll build a kernel for a Core2 processor. Besides the change of processor type in the configuration I also select support for 64GB as my laptop has 4GB, which is the main reason I started compiling my own kernels. I have some other changes but that’s beyond this article.

Preparations

Let’s get started by preparing our machine for compiling a kernel for Ubuntu Karmic.
Open a terminal.

sudo su -
apt-get install fakeroot build-essential
apt-get install crash kexec-tools makedumpfile kernel-wedge
apt-get build-dep linux
apt-get install git-core libncurses5 libncurses5-dev

Create a directory where you would like to build your kernel, this directory will hold the kernel source in a sub directory and all the deb files will end up in this folder. I choose /d1/development/kernel/karmic

Getting the source

cd /d1/development/kernel/karmic
git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git source

The source code is installed in the directory source.

We will create a branch in which we will be doing our modifications. That way the master branch will stay in tact which will make future updates a whole lot easier.
To see the latest version:

cd source
cat debian.master/changelog|more

Press q to get back to the prompt.
This results in something like this:

linux (2.6.31-15.50) UNRELEASED; urgency=low

  CHANGELOG: Do not edit directly. Autogenerated at release.
  CHANGELOG: Use the printchanges target to see the curent changes.
  CHANGELOG: Use the insertchanges target to create the final log.

 -- Stefan Bader   Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:58:14 +0100

linux (2.6.31-15.49) karmic-proposed; urgency=low

The latest version is the first version after the UNRELEASED section. In this case it is 2.6.31-15.49. Sometime there is no UNRELEASED section and in that case the latest version is the first version you see.
You could select any version you see in the changelog but for the sake of this article we’ll use the latest version.

git checkout Ubuntu-2.6.31-15.49 -b core2

This will create a branch called core2.

Creating a new config

I’ll be using the method of creating a new flavor, this adds a bit more work but you can always compile the original kernels.

We’ll use the generic flavor as the base for our own flavor,core2.

cp debian.master/config/i386/config.flavour.generic debian.master/config/i386/config.flavour.core2
fakeroot debian/rules clean
debian.master/scripts/misc/kernelconfig oldconfig

To make changes to the configuration file we need to edit the configuration file. The kernel developers have created a script to edit kernel configurations, unfortunately you will have to go through all the flavors for this script to work properly.

debian.master/scripts/misc/kernelconfig editconfig

This script will show you which configuration is next to be edited. You should not make changes, you can save the configuration if you like, the only time you have to edit the configuration is when you see

 * Run menuconfig on i386/config.flavour.core2... Press a key.

Make your changes, save the configuration and then keep going until the script ends.

When you’re done, make a backup of the config flavor file.

cp debian.master/config/i386/config.flavour.core2 ../.

Now we need to clean up the git tree

git reset --hard
git clean -xdf

Getting ready for compilation

Because we are going to be creating a new flavor based on a existing flavor (generic in my case) we need to create some extra files. During compilation the process checks the previous release for some settings, as we’re creating a local flavor it doesn’t exist in the source, so we’re creating it. The previous release in this case is 2.6.31-14.48

ls debian.master/abi
cp debian.master/abi/2.6.31-14.48/i386/generic debian.master/abi/2.6.31-14.48/i386/core2
cp debian.master/abi/2.6.31-14.48/i386/generic.modules debian.master/abi/2.6.31-14.48/i386/core2.modules

Copy our flavored configuration file back.

cp ../config.flavour.core2 debian.master/config/i386/

We need to edit the following files

  • debian.master/scripts/misc/getabis
  • debian.master/rules.d/i386.mk

In the next few parts I’ll explain what you need to change

File: debian.master/scripts/misc/getabis

Search for the line:

getall i386 generic generic-pae 386

Change it in:

 getall i386 generic generic-pae 386 core2

File: debian.master/rules.d/i386.mk

Search for the line:

flavours        = generic generic-pae 386

Change it in:

flavours        = generic generic-pae 386 core2

We need to make the compilation process aware of our own flavor we want to compile.

cp debian.master/control.d/vars.generic debian.master/control.d/vars.core2

You can edit the file and make it your own.

arch="i386 amd64"
supported="Core2"
target="Geared toward Core2 systems."
desc="x86/x86_64"
bootloader="grub | lilo (>= 19.1)"
provides="kvm-api-4, redhat-cluster-modules, ivtv-modules, ndiswrapper-modules-1.9"

We need to commit our changes in the git repository.

git add .
git commit -a -m "Core2 modifications"

The text after -m is the message you add to your commit.

Compilation

It’s finally time for compiling but before we can start the compilation process there is one more step to do. I didn’t put this in the Preparations section as you need to the following step whether you make changes to the configuration or not

fakeroot debian/rules clean

To start the compilation.

skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-core2

Next you need to run

skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-indep

Installation

After the compilation is finished we’ll have several deb files in the parent directory.

linux-doc_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb
linux-headers-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb
linux-source-2.6.31_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb
linux-headers-2.6.31-15_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb
linux-image-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb

To install the files

cd ..
dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb linux-headers-2.6.31-15_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb linux-image-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb

Check your bootloader if the newly installed kernel is the default one, for grub check the file /boot/grub/menu.lst or if you run grub2 check /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reboot and enjoy your newly installed kernel.

This article is filed under the category Ubuntu and has the following tags associated with it: , .

For more of the same articles see the page Compile a kernel for Ubuntu overview
  • Nixlu

    Just a quick one, wouldn’t doing a

    “sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.31-14-generic-pae”

    be what you are looking for, sure you won’t get the lastest kernel but you will get past the 3gig limit

    • You are correct that will do the trick as well but I also changed some other kernel settings, like changing the Processor family to Core2/newer Xeon, disabling Generic X86 support. to name a few.

      • Pav

        I followed the above procedure to compile a new kernel based out of Karmic and I could even install and run it. Thanks a lot.
        I have added my own stuff to the kernel code and there are some errors in it (doesn’t interfere with the kernel’s regular functionality – error happens only when I create a particular kind of socket).

        Now to fix this error, I have made changes in udp.c, xfrm.h etc. And then issued the last command from your tutorial above
        “skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-kvp”
        I hoped that this would recompile the changed files – but it never does. I verified this by removing the corresponding .o files from debian/build/build-kvp/ path and they did get created on running the above command after my changes.

        How do i do incremental compiles of the kernel src tree (after I have done the complete build once) without having to do complete clean and compile – this takes nearly 3hrs to run on my VirtualBox 🙁

        Also, if i want to add a new file to the kernel source tree at say net/ipv4/myownfile.c – can I get it compiled by just adding it in the net/ipv4/Makefile under a specific config item that I know I would be selecting?

        Can you point me to help-pages on these tips-tricks on kernel-developer’s everyday life? Thanks a lot.

        Regards
        Pav

        • If you add files or make changes you will have to commit them to the Git tree, otherwise they will be undone when you do a git reset.

          I haven’t found documents about incremental compiling a kernel, it might be possible but I wouldn’t know about it.

          For help I would start at http://kernel.org they have mail listings available where you can posts questions like adding your own file.

          • Pav

            Hello Peter.
            Thank you for the reply.
            I am not using git – all my changes are going to be local.

            Unfortunately, even to see if there are any syntax errors in my new changes, I need to recompile to whole kernel and that s what is bothering me.

            A simple makefile is capable of detecting source code changes – thats what it is meant for. Not sure why ubuntu made it so complicated – there is so much that goes under the hood but leaves out this simple and most important requirement!

            Sorry to rant here, but I have already done 3 full compiles of the kernel since yesterday – I am new to kernel development, I cant generate the perfect code without going through few iterations!

            Thanks a lot for trying to help.

  • Michael

    I don’t know if this might have been pulled from the release, but I installed the beta and upgraded from there and my version of karmic uses grub2 and has no menu.lst

    • The default grub in Karmic is the older grub but if you run grub2 you’ll have to check /boot/grub.cfg
      I have to correct myself. The default grub with a new installation of Karmic is grub v2(grub-pc). I did an upgrade from Jaunty which doesn’t install grub-pc.

  • Robert Luckoff

    I still do it by downloading the latest kernel source from kernel.org. Then I do the ‘ol make xconfig, make, make install, make modules_install and then update-grub.

  • David

    Tried this, and everything worked fine up until I ran the

    CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=2 NOEXTRAS=1 skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-XXXX

    command. (where XXXX is replaced by my special name). When I ran this, I got the following error:

    make[1]: *** No rule to make target ‘binary-XXXX’. Stop.

    I went back and checked my steps. I verified files were in place and edited as required. Still fails.

    Any ideas?

    • Did you run the clean command?
      fakeroot debian/rules clean

      • David

        Hi Peter,

        Yes, I did run the Clean command at you typed it. Is there a config or makefile I can look in to verify that my branch name has been included? Note: when I run the second command that you recommend:

        CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=2 NOEXTRAS=1 skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-indep

        that command actually completes without an error. But with my branch name, it fails. Is there any limit on the name or length of name chosen? My XXXX name is actually 8 characters long.

        Thanks for your help.

        • After the clean command, you can check debian/control

          cat debian/control | grep Package| grep linux-image

          There should be a line in there like:
          Package: linux-image-2.6.####-XXXX
          #### is the kernel version
          XXXX is your flavor name.

          • David

            Hi Peter,

            After I retyped my last message and sent it the second time, the first copy and your response to it then showed up. Arghh! Please forgive the duplication.

            Anyway, thanks for the response. I executed the above command, and sure enough, the control file has the line with the kernel number and with my ‘flavor’ in it. A wider grep shows my flavor appearing in 3 Package lines within the control file: linux-image, linux-headers, and linux-image-debug.

            I then followed that up with the following two commands:

            fakeroot debian/rules clean
            and
            CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=2 NOEXTRAS=1 skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-XXXX

            And I get the same make “No Rule” Stop error as before.

            Thanks,

            David

    • David

      Hi Peter,

      Responded earlier, but it didn’t show up on this page, so I’m responding again. Hope its not a duplicate.

      Yes, I did execute the clean function. I did so on both attempts I made to build the new kernel (scrolled back to verify), and the clean command ran successfully. But the following execution of ‘rules’ to build binary-XXXX still failed with the following result:

      make[1]: *** No rule to make target ‘binary-XXXX’. Stop.

      I did try to run the second version of ‘rules’ that you indicated would be ‘wise’ to run – the one that builds binary-indep. That one ran without error, although it didn’t appear to build any usable kernel.

      Question: XXXX represents my custom kernel name, similar to your ‘core2’ example. However, the XXXX name I use is actually 8 characters long. Is there any limit on name length that might cause problems?

      Not sure where to go from here. Thanks for the help.

      • Interesting you don’t see your previous reply, I replied:

        After the clean command, you can check debian/control

        cat debian/control | grep Package| grep linux-image

        There should be a line in there like:
        Package: linux-image-2.6.####-XXXX
        #### is the kernel version
        XXXX is your flavor name.

      • I don’t think there is a limit, especially not 8 characters.

        Do you have special characters in the name? Like spaces?

      • What is the result of:
        dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_ARCH

        • David

          Ahh.

          It’s AMD64. That’s the wrong architecture, as this is a CORE2 processor. I must be setting something wrong in the menuconfig. I thought I had set things correctly, but apparently not. Any hints?

          Thanks,

          David

          • Because it says AMD64 you will need to make the changes to the amd64 files.

            the command you run is ran in the compilation process to determine which files to use, and even though you have a Core2 proc, the system is said to be AMD64

  • Francois

    Hi !

    Very interesting ! Only this one little thing that annoys me : I have checked out 2.6.31-14.51 and when I launch compilation, i see “arbitrary signature 2.6.31-14.48” … Not that I worry that much about signatures, but I’d like to get this right… any idea ?

    Thanks,
    François

    • Francois,

      I see no 2.6.31-14.51 in the repository.

  • Hello!
    Very detailed tutorial!Thanks for that!
    This is the first time when I’ve compiled my one kernel.
    The issue is that this new kernel doesn’t appeared after installed in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

    Do you have any ideea how to correct this?
    Thanks!

    • Is the kernel installed in /boot?

      You should have the following files:
      abi*
      config*
      initrd*
      System.map*
      vmcoreinfo*
      vmlinuz*

      If you have these files you can run:
      sudo update-grub

      • Hello!
        Thanks for the reply!
        I’ve looked in /boot and I don’t see new kernel there, although I’ve installed and run all the above steps.

        • Adam

          I think that’s because of a typo:

          “cd ..
          dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.31-15_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb
          dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb linux-headers-2.6.31-15_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb”

          This two commands will install only headers not actual image. I think that first line should be :
          dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb

          Hope that helps.

          • Thank you for this catch. I’ll update the article

          • Thanks Adam!
            It worked! 🙂
            Next step for me is to understand what every configuration option means. After wards I will compile a kernel specific to my system. 🙂

  • Thomas

    Seems like running:

    $ head debian.master/changelog

    would be a bit more succinct than:

    $ cat debian.master/changelog|more

    followed by ‘q’. Regardless, helpful how-to.

  • HotShotDJ

    If one has modules that are managed by DKMS, the headers need to be installed before the kernel or the compilation of those modules will fail. The better command to install your newly compiled kernel would be:

    dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb linux-headers-2.6.31-15_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb linux-image-2.6.31-15_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb

    • Thanks for this insight. I changed the how to accordingly.

  • Cody Hardman

    Could you please explain the purpose of NOEXTRAS, skipabi, and skipmodule?

    I’ve been using the make-kpkg method all this time. I’m very happy to have come across this article.

    I have been using INSTALL_MOD_STRIP=1 lately in hopes of making the kernel smaller. Is there any specific reason you do not use this?

    Thank’s for the article, I look forward to reading your response.

    • Cody Hardman

      Also one quick question, how are patches handled? Say I want to patch my kernel with BFS 310 and ureadahead, at what point would it be best to patch? I would guess it would have to be some point before commit? Maybe before cleaning up the git tree?

      Thanks again!

      • You will have to patch before you start compiling of course. You can add your patch before the commit in this article, which means you would have to patch just after you copied the vars.core2 file.

        So it would be:
        copy the vars.core2 file
        Do your patching
        git add .
        git commit -a -m “Core2 modifications”

        Keep in mind if you do patch upstream files you might get git merge failures when you follow the article: How to update your custom Ubuntu Karmic kernel after a new kernel release

    • Actually the NOEXTRAS is no longer used in the makefiles, so you can skip it. You can skip the CONCURRENCY_LEVEL as well, it’s automatically determined in the rules files.

      skipabi and skipmodule disables a comparison check of modules of the current abi and the previous abi.
      As there were no previous core2 modules we can’t really to a comparison.

      INSTALL_MOD_STRIP is set to 1 in the rules. There is no need to add it to the cmd-line. See debian.master/rules.d/2-binary-arch.mk lines 67-69

  • deChrLam

    Congrats on a very detailed and well written guide. It was a pleasure to follow it and build a new kernel

    The last bit of the last command is not quite correct

    dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb linux-headers-2.6.31-15_2.6.31-15.49_all.deb linux-image-2.6.31-15-core2_2.6.31-15.49_i386.deb

    • HotShotDJ

      I would like to whole-heartedly agree with deChrLam. You guide is EXTREMELY well written. Just about anybody should be able to create a customized kernel using your guide. Thank you so much for your dedication to helping the community.

  • knuutsen

    Hey,

    still a question : is it possible to compile with your introduction listed above on a amd64 machine a 32bit kernel?

    Reason:
    My netbook needs at least 4 hours to compile and i have to fix something that needs many different compilations… please tell is this possible.

    Thx in advance
    knuutsen

    • You can compile a 32bit kernel on a 64bit OS but you need to set up a 32bit environment with the help of debootstrap.

  • Matt

    All I would like to do is add the patch for app armor support. Yet I can’t seem to find just a specific patch for that either in ubuntu or a new enough one at Novell. Other than that, I’m the type of person who prefers vanilla over distro kernels. Any tips on that?

    • Try using this git repository:

      git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/jj/apparmor-mainline.git source

      Let us know if that is what you were looking for.
      This repository can not be used to compile a kernel as described in this article. It is a vanilla kernel and should be treated as such.

      • Jesse

        Is there a howto for compiling from a vanilla kernel? I’ve tried to start from the standard config file in /boot (config-2.6.31-16-generic) applied to a vanilla kernel and successfully compiled but it won’t boot. My thoughts are that this might be due to some new process introduced in Karmic. Any thoughts or suggestions?

  • Tan Wei Chong

    Question, if I git clone from git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git. In future, when there is a ubuntu-lucid.git, do i need to git clone the whole thing again? Or is there someway I can just continue with some kind of “git pull” so that the download is less?
    For example, I only need to git clone http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git once, and from there only need to git pull.
    I notice when I do a git clone –reference linux-2.6 git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git, the amount being downloaded is quite big.
    Thanks.

    • As far as I know now you will have to do a new clone. The Ubuntu kernel developers create a new repository for each Ubuntu release.

      By using the reference option you do cut down the amount of data and time quite a lot.

      time git clone --reference /d1/development/kernel/vanilla/source/ git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-lucid.git source
      Initialized empty Git repository in /d1/development/kernel/lucid/source/.git/
      remote: Counting objects: 30893, done.
      remote: Compressing objects: 100% (8089/8089), done.
      remote: Total 28274 (delta 21618), reused 26489 (delta 19892)
      Receiving objects: 100% (28274/28274), 30.99 MiB | 763 KiB/s, done.
      Resolving deltas: 100% (21618/21618), completed with 1356 local objects.
      Checking out files: 100% (30919/30919), done.

      real 1m13.555s
      user 0m14.417s
      sys 0m3.728s

      compared to

      time git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-lucid.git source2
      Initialized empty Git repository in /d1/development/kernel/lucid/source2/.git/
      remote: Counting objects: 1390941, done.
      remote: Compressing objects: 100% (233559/233559), done.
      remote: Total 1390941 (delta 1152243), reused 1386311 (delta 1147672)
      Receiving objects: 100% (1390941/1390941), 394.43 MiB | 763 KiB/s, done.
      Resolving deltas: 100% (1152243/1152243), done.
      Checking out files: 100% (30919/30919), done.

      real 11m19.735s
      user 1m54.743s
      sys 0m26.142s

  • fabio

    Hi, Peter.

    I didn’t get the _all.deb files at the end of the process, only the _i386.deb (in my case amd64). Maybe for that reason i’m not able to install the headers, just the binary. The installer complains about missing dependencies for the header files 🙁

    • Did you also ran:
      skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-indep

      • fabio

        Not sure anymore. Maybe I inadvertently skipped this one. I’ll go through the whole process again and let you know if things change.

        Thnx a lot!

        • fabio

          Hi, Peter.

          You were right! I did miss that step. Now it works like a charm. Thanks a lot for this extremely helpfull (and well written) how-to!

          -fm

          • I am happy you were able to compile your own Ubuntu kernel.

  • Hello,

    I am using your description which is pretty clear but I am running into a problem. I have checked out the 2.6.31-18.55 version and the result is that debian/rules has moved to debian.master (which is not a real problem) but also there is no debian.env file in the debian directory. I have now “solved” this by adding DEBIAN=debian.master to the kernelconfig script which obviously is not the correct solution. How should I deal with this?

    • You should run : fakeroot debian/rules clean
      This will create the rules file in debian, you have to run it twice
      Once during the configuration
      The 2nd time before compilation.

      • Hello Peter,

        Thanks for the quick reply. This indeed solves my problem. (As you can see I am new to KARMIC and Debian).

        Best regards,

        Wim

  • Hello,

    For some reason I get the error :

    “dh_installchangelogs : package linux-image……. is not in control info” when executing the fakeroot debian/rules binary-core2 command in your description.

    I check the debian/control to see if there is any reference to “linux-image…..” in there but there isn’t. I verified the changes in getabis and i386.mk and the changes are there.

    Do you have any suggestions of what could have gone wrong and where to look for the problem?

    Thanks in advance.

    Wim

    • Forget about this. It was a mistake that occurred somewhere in the configuration. The control file is created correctly now!

  • Thai

    After reading this post, I started compiling my own kernel. Unfortunately, I did the compilation on a 900MB disk and found out that 900MB is not enough.

    I have aCore2Duo T6570 cpu. Could those who finished the compilation and have a core2duo please let me and others know if you can see any significant performance improvement on your systems?

  • Chris

    Thank you for this good article. I was able to compile my own kernel with your help.

    How would be the workflow for compiling several versions of the kernel with different configurations? I want to change the configuration frequently (for finding out what’s good and what is not) without recompiling everything and without conflicts in the package manager or elsewhere. Would be nice if you could help me with that.

    • If you want to change the configuration I do believe you’ll have to compile the kernel all over again.
      By recompiling you won’t have conflicts, what you could do to keep track of your configurations is make backups of every configuration under a different name.

  • Saint DanBert

    I notice that you type “sudo su -” before you perform a series of apt-get commands The “su -” uses set -user to start a login shell ( ‘-‘ ) as superuser. This is redundant on a couple of levels. First, one does not to be super user to run “su”.
    Using “sudo -i” uses the super-user-do command as an interactive shell ( ‘-i’ ). Likewise, “sudo -b” runs the command as a background task.Check out the sudo man-page for details.

    If there is a difference between “su -” and “sudo -i” I have not found any operational reason. I prefer and recommend “sudo -” because there is logging whereas “su -” has none.

    Another man’s thoughts,
    ~~~ 0;-Dan

    • You don’t have to use sudo for the su command, but in Ubuntu direct login as root is disabled (no password is set for the root user making it impossible to login in). When you type su -, you ask to login directly as root and as mentioned, this is disabled by default.

      su –> login as root
      sudo –> run as root

      So by running sudo su -, you basically trick the system, you run su as root and the systems says, ok you are root so no need to ask for a password. To show this try the following:
      Open a terminal as a normal user and run su – you will be prompted for a password. Now become root and run su – no password is required.

      Using sudo -i brings environment variables DISPLAY and TERM into the root shell from the user that executes the command and adds the environment variables SUDO_USER and SUDO_UID. In general that is not that big of deal, in our case we could use sudo -i instead of sudo su -.

  • Saint DanBert

    I really want to do this and REALLY enjoyed the read. As usually, I have questions:

    1. There is list of drivers and modules (lsmod &c) that get used on my hardware. What is a good way to create a reasonably complete list so that I don’t break something I use? How do I make sure that I have all of the various parts and
    back ports and extras and whatever so that everything get built completely and correctly?

    2. Is there a good roadmap to help match kernel config parameters with my own hardware and operational requirements?

    Thanks,
    ~~~ 0;-Dan

  • goro4111

    Thanks for the detailed well structured HOWTO. It actually helped me a lot to start compiling the kernel form my old pc.

    I must say that I followed all the step, several times, and I do not see any problem with the steps themselves, but I have a problem with booting up with the kernel I made.

    After I compile my kernel (2.6.31-20.57) and install it, I reboot and grub will default choose the new kernel (perfect). The boot process stop when the following error is received:
    udevd [xx]: segfult …. error 6 in libc.so.6 Segmentation fault

    I tried the compilation several times, but still with no luck. Would you please guide me if I’m missing anything or whether the new version (20.57) is not compatible with this description.

    Note: I’m changing the configuration of the kernel with quite few things:
    – Select the Configure standard kernel features (for small systems) from General Setup
    – Disable Power management AND ACPI options
    – Disable DMA engine support form Device Drivers
    – Disable some of the Ubuntu supplied third-party device drivers

    Once again, thanks for the super blog, and one more thanks for helping me.

  • cac gomboo

    Hey,
    You said, you made the compilation because you need 4G support. Which option gave you this in menuconfig? I don’t see you mentioned it at all.. 🙁

    • Location: Processor type and features -> High Memory Support -> 64GB

  • cac gomboo

    Yeah, no such thing in my menuconfig. 🙁 However, I put it manually as CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G=y, but not even I’ve got more, it reduced from 3GB to 2.82G. (No memory related options in Bios)
    Anyway, thanks! I gave it a try..

  • Paul B

    Great post. It would also be great detailing how to upload this into a launchpad PPA. Then it could be managed from there and taking advantage of their build daemons.

  • Andy Whitcroft

    It should be noted that you should not call kernelconfig directly to edit the configurations … you should use:

    debian/rules editconfigs

  • Georgios Zarkadas

    Hi Peter,

    Great post! When I first read it I said to my self: “too easy to be true”; but I followed your instructions and it worked flawlessly! I am now righting from my new with Core2-optimized kernel system. Many thanks!

    I have a question: wanting to get the most out of performance I did tweak a little the top-level Makefile at lines 224 and 225 making the following changes:

    HOSTCFLAGS = -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O3 -mtune=native -march=native -fomit-frame-pointer
    HOSTCXXFLAGS = -O3 -mtune=native -march=native

    Did those options actually affected the build? I am asking this because there are other options below and I don’t know well enough how the kernel build system actually works and whether it is the value of these flags that is propagated to directories below or of others. The compilation output does not help either (at least at the default verbosity level that I used).

    Hope you can shed some light on this; and thanks again for this concise and highly useful post!

    • They should affect the build. These two are not redefined elsewhere in the scripts, they are exported in the Makefile for later use.

  • Regarding Wim’s post number 15 above. I’m seeing what he saw, that is that the source initially only has debian.master/ but no debian/, your advice was to run “debian/rules clean” and it would be created. But how is that possible? You can’t run “debian/rules” if there is no debian/ ?

    I found that I could create debian/ using “make-kpkg debian” but that stil does not create the debian.env that debian/rules/misc/kernelconfig is looking for. If I use “debian/rules clean” while debian/ exists then it is actually deleted. So attempting to run that twice is NOT the solution (in fact it’s simply not possible)

    Any ideas?

    Initially all I’m trying to do is build EXACTLY the same linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic that you get from Ubuntu repositories that you get with “apt-get source linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic”. The problem is getting the .config right. It does not work to simply copy Config-NNN from /boot of a system that already has linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic installed because the Config-NNN file that is put there has CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=y which the kernel itself clearly did not have when it was built.

    Wrightfyer

    • Where are you getting your kernel source from?

      • As I said “apt-get source linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic” so it should be EXACTLY the same source that builds the linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic.deb that is in the Karmic repository.

  • Thai Dang Vu

    Now Lucid was out there. Is anybody willing to write something like this for 10.04?

    Let me start with this:

    – debian.master/scripts/misc/kernelconfig doesn’t exist, but debian/scripts/misc/kernelconfig does

    – in kernelconfig, there’s this line: bindir=”`pwd`/${DROOT}/scripts/misc” I had to change it to bindir=”`pwd`/${DROOT}/debian/scripts/misc”

    – debian.master/scripts/misc/getabis doesn’t exist, but debian/scripts/misc/getabis does and it doesn’t contain any line like this getall i386 generic generic-pae 386. So I cannot make any change to that file.

    – I had to install these packages: binutils-dev, libelf-dev, asciidoc (wow, Need to get 359MB of archives.
    After this operation, 562MB of additional disk space will be used.)

    And finally, I got
    linux-doc_2.6.32-22.33_all.deb
    linux-headers-2.6.32-22_2.6.32-22.33_all.deb
    linux-headers-2.6.32-22-core2_2.6.32-22.33_i386.deb
    linux-image-2.6.32-22-core2_2.6.32-22.33_i386.deb
    linux-source-2.6.32_2.6.32-22.33_all.deb
    linux-tools-common_2.6.32-22.33_all.deb

  • subhash pujari

    Hi Peter,

    I am new to linux enviornment. Thanks for the tutorial, I have followed all the step mentioned in the site and installed the new image of the linux kernel. Its showing in the grub.conf, but the new system its not showing in the boot time.

    • Not sure why it wouldn’t show up at boot time, unless you also have grub v2 installed and it’s not added in that configuration.

  • Jon Leighton

    Hi Peter –

    I’m trying to rebuild 2.6.31-22.65 generic-pae. I’m not modifying the configuration but I’m applying a patch to net/sctp/transport.c. After building the kernel, I get the 3 linux-*_all.deb files, but not the linux-header*.deb and linux-soruce*.deb files that correspond to the configuration I created. I’ve been through the process twice with the same result. Do you have any suggestions for what might be going wrong? Thanks.

    – Jon

  • Wow…I am just learning these words in my IT classes. Recognize I have a lot to learn and actually study and understand.

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