Kernel upgrade

I’ve been running Slackware64 14.0 happily on my laptop, with a few annoyances. After fixing them as described in the previous post, the machine was quite stable for a week or so, when it froze again. Then I googled around and found a discussion about a similar issue, that was solved by upgrading the kernel. I cannot find the link at the moment. Anyways, I decided to give it a try and here’s what I did:

1. Download kernel source version 3.7.7 from kernel.org
2. Get a .config file. I used the config-generic-3.7.1.x64 from Slackware64 -current, which at this time was here.
3. Unpack the kernel source, move it to /usr/src, remove the existing linux symlink and create a new one pointing to linux-3.7.7
4. Navigate to /usr/src/linux and copy the ready config-generic-3.7.1.x64 inside, renaming it to .config
5. Then, following the instructions kindly provided at slackdocs, compile the new kernel:

make oldconfig

make bzImage modules

make modules_install

cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-generic-3.7.7

cp System.map /boot/System.map-generic-3.7.7

cp .config /boot/config-generic-3.7.7

cd /boot/

rm System.map

ln -s System.map-generic-3.7.7 System.map

I did not even bother to build in my root filesystem module. In stead, I just created an initrd file, specific for this kernel as follows:

mkinitrd -c -k 3.7.7 -m reiserfs -o /boot/initrd-3.7.7.gz

Now, it is time to take care of lilo. I opened and edited /etc/lilo.conf, adding the following:

# End LILO global section
# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz-generic-3.7.7
  initrd = /boot/initrd-3.7.7.gz
  root = /dev/sda5
  label = generic-3.7.7
  read-only

Save and reinstall lilo with:

lilo -v

Reboot and the system seems to work very well! …for now…