Kernel upgrade
Posted: 2013-02-16 Filed under: desktop, system Leave a commentI’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:
- Download kernel source version 3.7.7 from kernel.org
- Get a
.config
file. I used theconfig-generic-3.7.1.x64
from Slackware64 -current, which at this time was here. - Unpack the kernel source, move it to
/usr/src
, remove the existinglinux
symlink and create a new one pointing tolinux-3.7.7
- Navigate to
/usr/src/linux
and copy the readyconfig-generic-3.7.1.x64
inside, renaming it to.config
- 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…