On Tuesday 31 March 2009 21:39:59 G. Matthew Rice wrote: > I'm not certain that I agree 100% with no hands-on compilation knowledge > but I also have to admit that I haven't had to compile a kernel in a number > of years. Some people do compile them if they need the very latest > releases for some reason. I sure don't volunteer for that work, though. > > That said, I'm open to the idea of dropping more Kernel building objectives > from the exam but that will have to wait for the objective refresh in > 18-24-ish months from now.
I'd argue that at LPIC-2 level it's an important skill to be able to patch specific drivers, or add an out-of-tree driver, and compile the resulting kernel. OTOH, selecting obscure kernel options to tweak the last 0.001% of performance is rightly the province of the distro kernel maintainer and isn't something we should be *expecting* a sysadmin to know how to do well. Case in point: I have boxes that have disgusting performance using the distro- stock driver to connect to the SAN. There is no officially maintained driver available but a quick recompile gets me the testing version which works well. Admittedly this is a FreeBSD box but the principle holds - someone in my team has had to do this on two occasions in the last year that I know of on Linux. And as for desktop support - on new notebooks it's almost a prerequisite to get anything brand new really working. iwl3945, thinkfinger, cisco VPN, TV cards - I've had to do them all on off-the-shelf Dell notebooks. To sum up: I definitely expect an LPIC-2 qualified person to be able to find trustworthy code via Google, download it and run make to get needed hardware working (Only Buy Supported Hardware! doesn't always work out - purchasing personnel don't always have the same point of view as us). -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
