I am experiencing severe problems running usb on my acer 8104 laptop
which may have something to do with the acpi dsdt area.
In order to investigate this I want to recompile my kernel. I
discovered that the linux tree was no longer part of the distribution when
Connie Seih sent me the email below, however I have not had any success
following this set of instructions which are taken from the release notes.

I have tried numerous times to follow the instructions below simply to
compile a default (unmodified) kernel which will boot using all 3 of the
configuration files that come with the src.rpm. I note too that these
configuration files are different to the configuration files found in
/usr/src/kernel/... (are these the ones that were used to compile the
kernels in the ditributions?). Specifically the one with the sl 4.1
hugemem distrubution has different subarch type: generic ........
whereas the ones that come with the rpm build does not have this and opts
for pc-compat. I have no idea if this is significant but are the config
files that come with the source rpm really the ones that were used to
build the kernels with the distro! I have also tried compiling with all
three of the /usr/src/kernels/... configuration files and they also fail.

The commands I used after downloading the following file from the SL site
are

kernel-2.6.9-11.EL.src.rpm


rpm -i kernel-2.6.9-11.EL.src.rpm

rpmbuild --target=i686 SPECS/kernel2.6.spec

cp configs/file ../.config   (note this differs from release notes)

make oldconfig

make bzImage

cp bzimage /boot


modified grub.conf

reboot



All versions fail to boot for various reasons

Prominent among the error messages are line like

insmod: error inserting '/lib/scsi-mod.ko' :Operation not permitted:-1


Finally crashing with a kernel panic or just hanging.


I have also tried rebuilding the modules and installing them but that had no effect


There must be something very silly and simple that I am doing wrong as
many people must have been requiring to rebuild their kernel so it must
my fault but I simply cannot see what.

Thanks

Rob Henderson





Dr Rob C W Henderson
Department of Physics    Lancaster University
Telephone : 01524 593617


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 14:24:31 -0600 (CST)
From: Connie Sieh <[log in to unmask]>
To: Rob Henderson <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: compiling the kernel


You are having issues because you do not have the full kernel source
installed.  The Upstream Vendor does not release the kernel-source rpm any
more.  Please read the RELEASE-NOTES-x86-en in /usr/share/doc/sl-release*/

>From RELEASE-NOTES-x86-en
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
     o In order to eliminate the redundancy inherent in providing a separate
       package for the kernel source code when that source code already
       exists in the kernel's .src.rpm file, Scientific Linux 4.x no
       longer includes the kernel-source package. Users that require access
       to the kernel sources can find them in the kernel .src.rpm file. To
       create an exploded source tree from this file, perform the following
       steps (note that <version> refers to the version specification for
       your currently-running kernel):

         1. Obtain the kernel-<version>.src.rpm file from one of the
            following sources:

               o The SRPMS directory on the appropriate "SRPMS" CD iso image

               o The FTP site where you got the kernel package

The kernel src.rpm can be obtained from
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/4x/SRPMS/vendor/errata/

         2. Install kernel-<version>.src.rpm (given the default RPM
            configuration, the files this package contains will be written to
            /usr/src/redhat/)

         3. Change directory to /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/, and issue the
            following command:

            rpmbuild -bp --target=<arch> kernel.spec

            (Where <arch> is the desired target architecture.)

            On a default RPM configuration, the kernel tree will be located
            in /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/.

         4. In resulting tree, the configurations for the specific kernels
            shipped in Scientific Linux 4.x are in the /configs/
            directory. For example, the i686 SMP configuration file is named
            /configs/kernel-<version>-i686-smp.config. Issue the following
            command to place the desired configuration file in the proper
            place for building:

            cp <desired-file> ./.config

         5. Issue the following command:

            make oldconfig

       You can then proceed as usual.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

-Connie Sieh

 On
Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Rob Henderson wrote:

> I am currently trying to get Scientific Linux to run properly on an Acer
> TravelMate 8104WLMi. I knew it had issues with the acpi and the DSDT
> database. In order to try to fix this I need to patch the kernel and
> recompile.
>
> I have however found that
>
> when from directory /usr/src/kernel/2.6.9-5.0.5.EL-hugemem-i686
> I issue the command
>
> >make zImage (I note make dep is no longer necessary)
>
> It fails with errors even for the standard unpatched kernel. I have tried a
> range of recent SL 4.0 4.1 and they all fail
>
> The 4.1 fails with
>
>
> root@lapi 2.6.9-5.0.5.EL-hugemem-i686]# make zImage
>   CHK     include/linux/version.h
>   SPLIT   include/linux/autoconf.h -> include/config/*
>   CHK     include/asm-i386/asm_offsets.h
>   HOSTCC  scripts/genksyms/genksyms.o
>   HOSTCC  scripts/genksyms/lex.o
>   HOSTCC  scripts/genksyms/parse.o
>   HOSTLD  scripts/genksyms/genksyms
>   CC      scripts/mod/empty.o
>   MKELF   scripts/mod/elfconfig.h
>   HOSTCC  scripts/mod/file2alias.o
>   HOSTCC  scripts/mod/modpost.o
>   HOSTCC  scripts/mod/sumversion.o
>   HOSTLD  scripts/mod/modpost
> make[1]: *** No rule to make target `init/main.o', needed by `init/built-in.o'.  Stop.
> make: *** [init] Error 2
>
>
> On an older release 3.9 I got
>
>
> /usr/src/linux-2.4.21-15.0.4.EL/include/net/esp.h:49: `crypto_hmac_update' undeclared (first use in this function)
> make[3]: *** [xfrm_algo.o] Error 1
> make[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.21-15.0.4.EL/net/xfrm'
> make[2]: *** [first_rule] Error 2
> make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.21-15.0.4.EL/net/xfrm'
> make[1]: *** [_subdir_xfrm] Error 2
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.21-15.0.4.EL/net'
> make: *** [_dir_net] Error 2
>
>
>
>
> This seems rather fundamental as if something has fundamentally changed
> which I have missed.
>
> I have been used to recompiling the kernel when using the old caldera distribution
> and never had any problems so I assume I am doing something fundamentally wrong.
> but without being able to recomp[ile I cannot fix problems.
>
> Thanks for any light on this
>
>
>
>
> Dr Rob C W Henderson
> Department of Physics    Lancaster University
> Telephone : 01524 593617
>