On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 07:46:47PM +0200, Tobias Klausmann wrote: > Hi! > > Recently, I have again bumped into the question whether one > should compile the kernel as root. One of the things that puzzles > me is why almost every HowTo, blog post and book recommends > building as non-root -- yet basically no distribution /helps/ the > user with doing that.
Most distros don't have to do anything, they are not requiring users to build their own kernels :) So in reality, they all do help their users with this, it's trivial to build a kernel as a user on those distros. Actually, it is also on Gentoo, there's no need to ever put a kernel anywhere except in your home directory when building it. Oh, and one more reason you "never want to build your kernel as root", a few years ago, the kernel build process had a bug where it accidentally tried to do a 'rm -rf /*' on your filesystem. None of the kernel developers ever noticed that as they didn't build a kernel as root, and the bug stuck around for a relativly long time (weeks at least.) There was also some semi-serious talk about leaving it in the build as well, just to "catch" people who were doing this, but sanity prevailed and it was fixed. But, you never know if that old bug might slip back in one day :) good luck, greg k-h
