Kernel RPM Question

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 12:36:01PM -0800, linuxproject at aws-sj.com wrote:
> is an awesome distro. The question I have is, how exactly do you
> configure the kernel to work on other machines in the rpm. Maybe I
> didn't phrase that right, basically what I mean, is it seems that
> during the install the kernel does some configuration on-the-fly (maybe
> I'm wrong) and I was just curious how you             configure this
> one kernel to work on various system setups. Also, what exactly do you

There are multiple RPMs for kernel which are generated when you do the
rpmbuild -ba.  Anaconda then decides the appropriate kernel to drop in
based on your system configuration.  Nothing is particularly configured on
the fly in that manner.  The kernel modules to be loaded are configured in
/etc/modules.conf during installation by kudzu I believe.

> need to do to create the rpm of this kernel, do you configure it, then
> do make rpm, or do you just do make rpm without any configuration to
> leave a full kernel.

To simply rebuild the rpm, you can take the SRPM and do an rpmbuild
--rebuild kernel-foo.src.rpm  or you can install the SRPM and do an
rpmbuild kernel-foo.spec.  As for configuration, RPM does all of the
configuration based on what is in the spec file.  This includes untarring
the mainline source, applying each patch, copying over the appropriate
config file, and building.   The 2.6 kernel makes things easier in that
regard because davej included a nice config munger which allows single
instances of the config information to be parsed at rpmbuild time, so you
do not have to include as many configs in the spec.  For more detail on
this, install the SRPM and take a look at the spec file, then do an
rpmbuild to watch what it does.

Justin