[SOLVED] Install Kernel 3.2 Fedora 16

[steinerd]

Hello all,

Let me start by saying that I have read the wiki for modifying and building a custom kernel. Seems like I am locked down using the rpmbuild system to the kernel.src that are located in the repositories. I have never really played around too much with modifying the kernel so if there is a better tutorial than the fedora wiki or if it is just plain NOT a good idea to try and move past the current kernel in a distribution I would appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks again,
Dan

[aesir]

On koji you can find the src rpm for any version of fedora kernels:http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/p...fo?packageID=8

A fast way to get 3.2 is to download the current f17 src and rebuild it

rpmbuild --rebuild kernel-3.2.0-2.fc17.src.rpm

If that does not work or you need to make any modification to that kernel things will be more difficult and you'll have to tell where you are stuck.

[Haber_Nir]

tell me it will be in fedora 16 in the future?

[stevea]

Maybe - but unlikely.

[DBelton]

as stevea said, it's unlikely that the 3.2 kernel will make it into F16 since it's a major version change. Fedora tries not to do version changes in the middle of a release cycle.

However it is likely (and probably already has happened) that some of the patches for the 3.2 kernel will be applied to the 3.1 kernel in F16.

[aesir]

Originally Posted by DBelton

as stevea said, it's unlikely that the 3.2 kernel will make it into F16 since it's a major version change. Fedora tries not to do version changes in the middle of a release cycle.
...

Why not? f15 changed from 2.6.38 up to 2.6.41(=3.1), why would they consider 3.1 to 3.2 a bigger change?

[Haber_Nir]

Originally Posted by aesir

Why not? f15 changed from 2.6.38 up to 2.6.41(=3.1), why would they consider 3.1 to 3.2 a bigger change?

good question.

[DBelton]

and you notice that they kept the 2.6.x numbering instead of changing it to the 3.0 numbering. That was probably to keep down the number of packages that would get broken by a major version change.

Part of the Fedora updates policy:

Releases of the Fedora distribution are like releases of the individual packages that compose it. A major version number reflects a more-or-less stable set of features and functionality. As a result, we should avoid major updates of packages within a stable release. Updates should aim to fix bugs, and not introduce features, particularly when those features would materially affect the user or developer experience. The update rate for any given release should drop off over time, approaching zero near release end-of-life; since updates are primarily bugfixes, fewer and fewer should be needed over time.

This necessarily means that stable releases will not closely track the very latest upstream code for all packages. We have rawhide for that.

.......

Package maintainers MUST:

Avoid Major version updates, ABI breakage or API changes if at all possible.
Avoid changing the user experience if at all possible.
Avoid updates that are trivial or don't affect any Fedora users.

Package maintainers SHOULD:

Push only major bug fixes and security fixes to release(n-1).

The entire policy can be read here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy

I do believe in the case of the F15 kernel, it was a unique situation where the 3.x kernel added features that were needed, but a backport of the fixes were not possible, so they made an exception and allowed the update, but kept the 2.6.xx numbering.

you may get parts of 3.2 backported to F15 Kernel an F16 kernel but thats about all.


as for the Kernel Numbering, i do believe 3.1.x was for maintainers as in the X going from 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and so on. as for Fedora/Redhat doing with 3.1.7.48 ithe 48 i believe would be Fedora/redhats patch numbering

[vallimar]

There is a chance you can just install the F17 built kernel rpm's into F16 also.
Usually it's simple, but they did update the requirements a bit during the 3.2 cycle
of rpm's so depending on how badly those changes may cascade requirements-wise,
you may only need to upgrade a couple other packages, or it may just not be feasible.
Download it and see before you try to build it yourself.

[steinerd]

Thanks to all for your help, it makes sense that I could cause some breakage by changing the major version number, all in all it looks like unless I have another machine I should wait until F17 to try this. Have not looked at what dependencies get mucked with but can't imagine it's too easy to go back from that upgrade. I really appreciate all of the input.

Dan

[PabloTwo]

I have an older Dell XPS 170M laptop that recently developed some graphics chip or graphics memory problems. It creates artifacts on the screen. In GUI mode, it's totally unusable, but I can get by in runlevel 3 OK. It's running F16 32 bit.

I decided to to have a whack at rebuilding the kernel-3.2.0-2.fc17.src.rpm on this Pentium M 2.26GHz machine, as it's not good for anything else now except for building 32 bit rpm packages for F16. I checked all the build requirements on koji and F16 provides everything you need. I did the rebuild using:

rpmbuild --rebuild --with baseonly --without debug --without debuginfo target=.i686 kernel-3.2.0-2.fc17.src.rpm

One hour and fiftty eight minutes later.... in my ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i686/ directory:

-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul 25427281 Jan  6 16:37 kernel-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul  7547845 Jan  6 16:38 kernel-devel-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul   806841 Jan  6 16:37 kernel-headers-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul  1530301 Jan  6 16:38 kernel-modules-extra-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul    88929 Jan  6 16:37 kernel-tools-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul    29789 Jan  6 16:37 kernel-tools-devel-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul   431677 Jan  6 16:37 perf-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 paul paul    93737 Jan  6 16:37 python-perf-3.2.0-2.fc16.i686.rpm

The "perf" and "python-perf" packages are new for F17:

Description:
This package contains the perf tool, which enables performance monitoring for the Linux kernel.

Next step will be to install the kernel* packages on the laptop and see how that flies, or not.

---------- Post added at 07:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:01 PM ----------

The 3.2.0-2 kernel packages installed and booted up with no problems. All the hardware and functions that were working on this laptop on the 3.1.x kernels appear to be working as well with the 3.2.0 kernel. Not a very good "testing" platform with the graphics glitch (I've uninstalled most of the GUI apps), but it's proof-in-the-pudding that building and installing the 3.2.0 kernel on F16 is quite easily doable.

[bob]

Just a caution on the 3.2 kernel: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTAzNzk

dunno if i'd believe a lot of the crap on Phoronix. Michaels been known to write crap, Just ask leigh .


read post #2 http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...650#post245650

[AndrewSerk]

The 3.2 vanilla kernel built and boots fine here on my intel quad core. <shrug.>