On 07/12/2011 06:44 AM, Lukas Press wrote:
> On 07/12/2011 12:29 AM, Brad wrote:
>> That would be great but there is a little problem there, I have no
>> knowledge on how to do that, and on other hand would I have to rebuild
>> the kernel each time a security update comes out? I have heard of
>> people doing this, and I have heard a few problems form doing this to.
>>
>> Now don't get me wrong I would love to learn how to do it, I just
>> don't have any idea where to start or what tools I would need to do
>> it. I have been using Linux for a few years but I have been more of a
>> end user and just learning what I need at that time not really digging
>> deep into it.
>>
>> Thanks for any help.
>>
>> On 07/11/2011 05:31 PM, JR van Rensburg wrote:
>>> You do have the freedom to do some customisation if you want to use the
>>> distro, and I would presume rolling your own kernel is one of them.
>>> If you don't want to roll your own kernel, you can always customise the
>>> distro by using the fedora kernel only and SL/Centos for the rest of the
>>> software.
>
> It is surprisingly easy to build a kernel from SRPM, such as a Fedora
> SRPM. Check out the SL Forum howto section on how to build packages from
> SRPM. - http://scientificlinuxforum.org/index.php?showtopic=128
> I built a F15 kernel using these methods with no problem at all after 2
> minutes' reading.
>
> Chris

 From direct work, I agree with your statement (much easier than what I 
remember from kernel building in the past) with one caveat:  if the 
building machine has sufficient processing bandwidth and/or you want to 
wait long enough. I did this on my workstation that has a 4 core AMD 
X86-64 current processor, sufficient RAM, hard drives, etc. -- not 
outrageously expensive nor especially high performance, but more than a 
typical mass merchandiser enduser consumer machine designed to run MS 
Office. It took about 45 minutes from issuance of the command to 
completion, with all four cores often peaking at 99 percent utilization. 
For any who are interested, I have a script copy of the operation of the 
process from rpmbuild forward during a kernel build (without actual 
machine utilization measurements).

One other comment:  I built a "universal" plain vanilla X86-64 SL6 
kernel from Fedora 15 "production" source as posted in a different 
thread (to get what appears to be fully function USB 3 support).  If one 
makes specific specializations, the resulting kernel may not behave as 
the builder supposed -- there are many options for kernel configuration.

I personally used a slight variation from the posted recipe based on 
past experience (I was not aware of the reference when I was building), 
but the method works.

A separate question:  is there a "howtos" section for SL that 
accumulates the specific postings such as the one mentioned above
http://scientificlinuxforum.org/index.php?showtopic=128

Yasha Karant