[PlanetCCRMA] Kernel Panic on boot - Newbie - Long

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 10:19, Ken Smith wrote:
> I'm currently using the VIA proprietary driver for the 6410 IDE interface
> and I have found it to be 9 times slower accessing the disk with the VIA
> proprietary driver/linux than accessing the same data on the same disk with
> the VIA driver for Win$dows. I timed how long it took to copy a 1G file. I
> have found a patch that is supposed to allow the linux native IDE drivers to
> support that hardware and I'm keen to see if that performs better. I've been
> using a fairly large project to try out with Ardour which has 18 tracks -
> each source .wav file is about 1G. xruns everywhere and jack shuts ardour
> down about every 20 secs. Smaller projects are fine and increasing the
> buffer size in jack helps but as soon as I add many effects it becomes crash
> city.
> 
> I've never compiled a Linux Kernel before so first I've tried just compiling
> the kernel from the source without modifying or patching anything. My nice
> new kernel panics at boot up. So I'm probably doing something very simple
> wrong but I just can't spot it.
> 
> My procedure is as follows...

Well, I normally compile kernels as rpm packages just like all the other
software. The "kernel-source" package is not the right starting point.
You should be using the "kernel-xxx-xx.src.rpm" package. That contains
all the sources for the kernel and all the extra patch files that are
applied. "kernel-source" is an auxilliary package (no longer created on
the 2.6.x kernels) meant only to build additional extra kernel modules,
not to build the whole kernel itself. 

So, download the .src.rpm package and "rpm -Uvh kernel-xxx.src.rpm"
install it. 

The spec file (the file that directs the rpm build process) will be left
at /usr/src/redhat/SPECS and all the sources will be at
/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES. 

At this point:
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
rpmbuild -bb --target i686 kernel-xxx-xx.spec
will rebuild up and smp versions of the kernel with no changes. 

Or:
rpmbuild -bp --target i686 kernel-xxx-xx.spec
will unpack all the sources and leave a ready to build tree with all the
sources and all patches applied at /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-... (and
the configuration files in the configs/ directory.

The way I do things is to edit the spec file, add the patch or patches
that I need (in two places), change the release number and rebuild it.
Non-tricial but not rocket sicence either.

-- Fernando