Using upstream kernels...

[Edward Lilley]

dom at latter.org writes:

> I thought I'd see if I could get Ubuntu 9.04 to run on top of 2.6.32,
> (vaguely hoping to fix various video issues).
>
> I've compiled and booted it, but networking doesn't work.  Further
> investigation reveals that there's only about seven modules, and the
> kernel config is set to build everything into the kernel.  But
> surprisingly the custom kernel isn't *that* much bigger than a
> typical Ubuntu one:
>   3968128 2010-02-08 17:14 bzImage-2.6.32.custom
>   3491824 2010-01-28 04:29 vmlinuz-2.6.28-18-generic
>
> Is that because it's bzip not gzip?  I'd have thought the kernel
> would be a lot bigger with all the modules compiled in.
> _______________________________________________
> CLUG mailing list
> clug at cambridge-lug.org
> Website: http://www.cambridge-lug.org

I had a problem with networking upgrading to 2.6.32 on Debian recently,
with an on-board Realtek 8168 ethernet device.
The problem was that the newer kernel added support for more recent
Realtek chips, including ones which required non-free firmware, so the
whole module was in some way disabled, even though it worked fine for
the previously-free-software-only devices.
Not sure how relevant this is though!

On another note, there seem to be lots of modules built into the kernel
these days; I'm not entirely sure how to pass options to them though --
presumably not with file in /etc/modprobe.d/?

Maybe modules aren't all that big after all? I would have thought they
are mostly wrappers to allow userspace libraries access to various bits
of hardware.

-- 
Edward Lilley <ejlilley at gmail.com>
http://blog.ugnus.uk.eu.org -- http://www.ugnus.uk.eu.org/~edward/