custom kernel

[S B]

Hi all,
  I made an attempt to custom build a kernel from the src.rpm. I
followed the tutorial by Kevin Hobbs to complete the task.
  I have several questions with the build process. I did read a couple
of tutorials before I actually build the kernel.


1. The build process failed at prep when I tried to build the binaries.  
      rpmbuild -bb --target=i686 ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/kernel-2.*.spec .
    I followed the tutorial (Kernel Compilation Tutorial-Kevin Hobbs)
step by step but could not build the kernerl.

2. So, I decided to build the binaries directly without rpmbuild -bp step. 
    So i installed the src.rpm,
    then rpmbuild -bb ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/kernel-2.*.spec. This went
smooth, except it took more
    than a couple of hours to build the rpms. 

So, is it normal for the build process to take this long? 
Why did the build process fail via the first method? (I should be able
to provide more information on this, I do not have the tmp files right
now)

During  the "make xconfig" I added ACPI /APM/ frequency scaling etc,
and then built the rpms.  However, after installing the newly build
kernel and rebooting into this new kernel, I dont know if all of the
above features were added or not. I could not find /proc/cpufreq, so I
dont think I will be able to scale the cpu frequency?

Thanks,
shashank