Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Building Linux kernel the clean way

I like to keep my kernel sources clean and have the kernel build in a separate directory. Here is how I do it.



1. Lets create a "~/kernel" directory for holding everything
$cd ~
$mkdir ~/kernel
$cd ~/kernel
2. Download and extract the kernel source
$wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.6.tar.bz2
$tar jxvf linux-3.6.tar.bz2
3. Create a build directory
$mkdir ~/kernel/build
Now our directory structure looks like:
~/
~/kernel/
~/kernel/build/
~/kernel/linux-3.6.tar.bz2
~/kernel/linux-3.6/
4. We will create a bash function that will automatically create the build folder for us based on the folder name of the kernel source. Add the following to the ~/.bashrc file. Once this is done open a new bash terminal so that the function is available for use.
function kb {
    mkdir -p ~/kernel/build/$(basename $(pwd))
    echo ~/kernel/build/$(basename $(pwd))
}
Running $kb in your shell will create the build folder and return the path of the build folder which we will pass it to "make" in the next step.

5. To build the kernel in the "build" folder follow your normal step except...
$cd linux-3.6
$make distclean
$make defconfig O=`kb`
$make O=`kb`
You can see that a folder called "~/kernel/build/linux-3.6" has been created and all the object files are created in the build folder and our original kernel source folder is kept clean. After the compiling is done the kernel is available in the ~/kernel/build/arch/x86/boot/bzImage or whatever is your architecture folder.

Note :
The keys surrounding the `kb` in the above steps are the backtick keys which are located along with the "~" key on your keyboard.

Extra :
If you download and extract the linux-3.5.tar.bz2 and repeat the above 5th step it will create a ~/kernel/build/linux-3.5 folder and build everything there.

Next time I am going to post how you can fully automate the build with git.

1 comment:

  1. We are not able to get the headers files in the builded kernel using this way.Can you give some suggestions

    ReplyDelete