[CLUE-Tech] kernel compile

[Jed S. Baer]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002 13:44:05 -0600
"Timothy C. Klein" <teece at silverklein.net> wrote:

> > [root at tunnel linux]# make install
> > make: *** No rule to make target `install'.  Stop.
> > 
> Don't know why make install would have failed.
> 
> The make install step I never do.  You technically don't need to copy
> files anywhere, you could probably boot them right from where they are,
> but nobody does that.

I do.

Before I install anything anywhere, I boot the freshly compiled kernel, to
be certain it will actually boot.

a stanza in my lilo.conf:
image=/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage
        label=fresh
        read-only
        root=/dev/hda5

If it fails, I do a standard boot to my known-working kernel.

> It is customary to copy /usr/src/linux/System.map
> to /boot/System.map-<kernel-version>.  Then you need to copy the kernel
> itself, which will be /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage to /boot.
> It is usally named vmlinuz or vmlinuz-<kernel-version>.  But you could
> call it anything you want.  You would then need to update
> /etc/lilo.conf, and run lilo.

I'm curious what distro (apparently) comes without the install target in
the makefile. That sounds like a buggered-up makefile to me. IIRC, when I
make install, there are a couple of steps other than the copy of the
kernel image to the boot location. I think the System.map gets regenerated
(and I note that the backup copies of older System.map files are different
sizes than my current one). OTOH, I used to just copy the new image to my
boot directory, and never had trouble doing it that way.

If there is a distro having a makefile without an install target, well, I
dunno. I once read through all the source for the shell scripts that
perform the install step. Authorship by Linux Torvalds, maybe Alan Cox
too, so I'd suspect they're part of even a vanilla kernel distribution.

jed
-- 
We're frogs who are getting boiled in a pot full of single-character
morphemes, and we don't notice. - Larry Wall; Perl6, Apocalypse 5