Kernel

From Freespire

This is documentation for how to modify and rebuild the Freespire kernel. There are several possible reasons to modify the kernel, and all of them indicate that there is either a deficiency in Freespire or a deficiency in Linux. Please help put any changes you find yourself needing into the main stream so that others can benefit from the features you are enabling.

There are four layers to the kernel packaging:

• The Source

  The bulk of this layer consists of a package containing the kernel source code from kernel.org. It also includes the packages that contain the source code for the third party kernel modules.

• The Image

  This layer consists of a package which contains the kernel executable itself (/boot/vmlinuz) and the set of modules that are built from the kernel source.

• The Extras

  This layer consists of a package which includes all the modules which are built from code which does not come from kernel.org - often known as 'third party' kernel modules.

• The Suite

  This layer consists of a package which uses the dependency system to pull in the correct versions of the image, extras, and various auxilliary packages the kernel requires.

Contents 1 Package Names 2 Tasks 3 Upgrading Kernel Modules 4 Adding New Kernel Modules 5 Modifying the Kernel 6 Upgrading the Kernel

Package Names

The names of each of the four packages mentioned above have the same format. For the kernel source is is "los-kernel-source-<sourceversion><configversion>". "Sourceversion" is the version number of the source package from kernel.org, currently "2.6.14". "Configversion" is empty for the normal kernel, but can be set to a dash followed by a string for special kernel configurations, for example "-smp" (for multi-processor machines.) Note that all this refers to the package name only, not the package version number.

Tasks

There are several different tasks you might want to perform all of which come under the heading "rebuilding the kernel". This includes, in order of increasing difficulty:

1. Upgrading the version of a third party module
2. Building a new third party module
3. Changing the kernel configuration parameters
4. Upgrading to a new kernel version

In the descriptions below we will assume that the current version of the kernel is 2.6.14.

Upgrading Kernel Modules

Adding New Kernel Modules

Modifying the Kernel

Upgrading the Kernel