All: Being a big fan of SuSE before coming to Gentoo, I was interested to note that gentoo had RedHat kernel sources, but not SuSE sources. Since I have always preferred the stability of the SuSE kernel over RedHat's [I know it's a subjective opinion, so no comments please :) ] I decided to rectify the situation and create an ebuild for the SuSE kernel sources.
I have installed the kernel on my desktops at work and at home and they have been running solid with the SuSE kernel for about two weeks now, with no issues arising concerning the kernel. Some features of the SuSE kernel that are not present in the gentoo-2.4.20-r7 sources are ALSA support built in, and more extensive support for Video for Linux support to include support for the Hauppauge WinTV cards. The gotcha's that I have noticed with using the SuSE kernel are: 1. The kernel sources are distributed by SuSE as an RPM. The RPM data is compressed with bzip instead of gzip. I discovered that rpm2targz doesn't understand bzipped RPM files and would not correctly process the rpm. Because of this, an explicit dependency for the kernel is the rpm ebuild. The only thing that is used from rpm is the rpm2cpio command to unpack the sources into the ebuild sandbox. I don't use rpm in any other way. The second dependency is cpio. This one really isn't an issue since it is part of the system, but to be safe, I included it anyway. 2. SuSE comes with ALSA ported into the kernel. The ALSA version used by SuSE is 0.9.0, while the Gentoo stable release is 0.9.2. I have configured the kernel to both use and not use the ALSA drivers bundled with the kernel and have not noticed a problem using either configuration. The following are the steps I took to install the kernel using genkernel. For those of you who completely roll your own kernel, I'm making the assumption, that you can figure it out from these instructions. I am also assuming that you already have your system up and running with another kernel, and that you have some familarity with the kernel compiling process. 1. Get the ebuild from: http://varnerfamily.org/pvarner/gentoo/suse-sources-2.4.20.100.ebuild.tar.bz2 2. mkdir /usr/local/portage 3. cd /usr/local/portage 4. tar xvjf suse-sources-2.4.20.100.ebuild.tar.bz2 5. Edit /etc/make.conf and uncomment the PORTDIR_OVERLAY variable and set it to PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage 6. emerge suse-sources 7.cd /usr/src 8. rm linux 9. ln -s linux-2.4.20-SuSE-100 linux 10. cp /usr/src/linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r7/.config /etc/kernels/config-2.4.20-SuSE-100 11. genkernel --config 12. In the kernel configuration, Processor Type and Features, ensure that Local APIC Support on uniprocessors and IO-APIC support on uniprocessors is turned on or ACPI support will not compile. 13. In the file systems section, ensure that /dev file system support and Automatically mount at boot is turned on. Turn off /dev/pts file system for Unix98 PTYs 14. Peruse through the rest of the configuration and set everything to match your hardware and desires. 15. Exit and save the config 16. Let genkernel do it's thing. 17. Modify the boot loader and add the entry for the new kernel and initrd Prior to rebooting, If I used built in ALSA support. 1. /etc/init.d/alsasound stop 2. emerge unmerge alsa-driver 3. emerge -i alsa-driver (inject the stub, so emerge -u won't try to reinstall alsa-driver) 4. reboot 5. login or su to root after the reboot and use lsmod to insure the sound modules loaded, use the alsamixer to make sure that the volume levels are set correctly. If I did not use the built in ALSA support. 1. /etc/init.d/alsasound stop 2. emerge alsa-driver 3. reboot 4. login or su to root after the reboot and use lsmod to insure the sound modules loaded, use the alsamixer to make sure that the volume levels are set correctly. Rebuild the other drivers that depend upon the kernel. For me, I have an nvidia card and use vmware, so I also execute the following. emerge nvidia-kernel vmware-config.pl If I get enough interest in the ebuild, I will submit it to gentoo for possible inclusion in the portage tree. At this point, besides determining possible interest, I'm also looking for problems with the ebuild as well as enhancements. One of the things that I would like to see, is an ebuild for creating only rpm2cpio. I have figured out how to build and install only rpm2cpio manually from the rpm sources. But I haven't decided the better method for creating and using such an ebuild. Should it block the install of rpm, or should the rpm ebuild be modified to unmerge the rpm2cpio ebuild if it is installed. Secondly, I'm not sure how I would specify in the suse-sources ebuild, the either the rpm or rpm2cpio ebuild would satisfy the dependency. Finally, as the SuSE /etc/motd would say "Have a Lot of Fun!" Regards, Paul Varner -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
