Patch kernel 26 to 29?

[lugoteehalt]

First time I've patched anything. Tried to patch kernel 26 to change it to 29. Did it --don't-actually-do-anything. A lot of it worked but a great deal of it did not.

Just wondering if it's too big a jump from ....26 -> ....29? Do you have to do 26 -> 27 -> 28 -> or something? Thanks any help.

[saikee]

There are still many distros on 26 including the current release of the stable Debian. The current popular distros PCLinuxOS and Mint are still 27 but the recent release of distros are on 28. Only a few of the Alpha releases use the 29 kernel (2.6.29). The big rush to 28 is apparently for the stable release of Ext4 which seems to run a bit faster but there are reports its journalling portion is signficantly slower than the Ext3. There appears to be an uproar because a journal system runs minutes behind isn't doing a job to safeguard against a crash.

[ph34r]

To upgrade you can either grab the full kernel source, or the individual patches to go from 26 to 27 to 28 to 29...

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks ph34r, definative.

There are still many distros on 26 including the current release of the stable Debian. The current popular distros PCLinuxOS and Mint are still 27 but the recent release of distros are on 28. Only a few of the Alpha releases use the 29 kernel (2.6.29). The big rush to 28 is apparently for the stable release of Ext4 which seems to run a bit faster but there are reports its journalling portion is signficantly slower than the Ext3. There appears to be an uproar because a journal system runs minutes behind isn't doing a job to safeguard against a crash.

Am I councilled therefore to not just slackjawed go to 29. I was doing it to try and loose some possible bugs - CD won't mount before, say, apt-get decides there is no CD, and problem with overlong sound latency, also can't get ?1360x786 display but can get it with kernel....27 on Kubuntu.

I'll try 27 and see what happens.

[retsaw]

You might as well go for the most recent stable kernel you can if you are going to upgrade, there is certainly nothing wrong with doing that. You may, however, want to stick to a kernel made specially for you distro, since I think Linus has said something along the lines of that it is the job of the distro to provide a stable kernel to the user, and most distros add a number of patches to fix bugs or add functionality that hasn't yet been included in the mainline kernel. That said, I have never had a problem running a vanilla kernel compiled from the source at kernel.org at least on the occasions I chose to do so (I haven't actually needed/wanted to compile my own kernel for quite a while).

[lugoteehalt]

You may, however, want to stick to a kernel made specially for you distro, since I think Linus has said something along the lines of that it is the job of the distro to provide a stable kernel to the user, and most distros add a number of patches to fix bugs or add functionality that hasn't yet been included in the mainline kernel.

Thanks. I'll put in 2.6.29.1 then. Have put in 27.1 very easilly.

I thought that since I was using the .configure file of Debian Lenny that that would automatically distribution-ize the kernel image. But this not so?

[bwkaz]

I thought that since I was using the .configure file of Debian Lenny that that would automatically distribution-ize the kernel image. But this not so?

Not quite, no. Especially if you're trying to compile a kernel whose release-version (the third number) is not the same as the kernel that this .config file came from.

Kernel configuration options move around and change names and such between releases; 2.6.29 very likely has some .config entries that 2.6.28 does not have, and might not have some .config entries that 2.6.28 does have. Also, if Debian added any patches that introduced .config entries, then those will not be applicable to any kernel that doesn't have the same patch.

(This is not a huge deal, as the kernel *config Makefile targets will adjust for it. But you don't automatically get the same kernel, either. )

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks bwkaz. Only thing I've found so far, apropos of very little, is there *seems* to be the bug in the 2.6.29.1 kernel, using it for AMD64, that virtualbox's *.deb package refuses to make the kernel module. The workarround for the x86 does not seem to work.

Er well it's virtualbox's bug really.

[lugoteehalt]

In fact virtual box's .deb thing works with a configured kernel source if the most up to date one is used.

Err.... should think there is not much point in using a 2.6.29 kernel, like I'm doing, if you use the .config of 2.6.26-amd64 Debian official configuration file. So used 'make oldconfig', which only asks questions about new stuff, and then did almost nothing except put ext4 filesystem into kernel, not as module. This works allright.