Building a kernel from source on RH9

[Kostas Sfakiotakis]

Greetings Barry,

Barry Gamblin wrote:

>I am trying to build the 2.4.28 kernel from source downloaded from 
>kernel.org on a RH9 system. I need to do this because fedora-legacy
>has not released a kernel that fixes the latest ELF load vulnerability.
> 
>I've run the make commands
>
>make xconfig
>make clean
>  
>
Please do reverse the above 2 lines , since in the way they
are , they don't make any sense . You first run the
"make clean step" in order to clean any left overs that there might
be . The make clean step is a preparation step .


>make bzImage
>make modules
>make modules_install
>
>I copied the bzImage file to /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.28 and the vmlinux file 
>to /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.28. I ran /sbin/new-kernel-pkg --mkinitrd 2.4.28.
>I added a stanza into /etc/grub.conf to load the new kernel.
>  
>

If i might ask , after the make modules_install why don't you
run a "make install" which will do all the neccesary copying and
will make the initrd file as needed . If the above steps are all that you
have done , then you have forgotten one file the System.map .

>But the system won't boot the new kernel. It gets to the point where
>it is trying to mount the / filesystem and panics.
>
>Is there a good HOWTO on building a kernel on Redhat? I'm obviously 
>missing something but I don't know what. I've read the Appendix A
>of the Redhat 9 customization guide but I still don't get where I've
>messed up.
>  
>

http://www.rhil.net/docs/kernelbuild.html

The above link contains a howto . It has helped me build kernels for the
Valhalla Edition ( Redhat 7.3 ) up to the Fedora Core 1 edition.
Last but not less important  C. Linus Hicks made a pretty good proposal ,
the one that says to replace the LABEL with the actual device .
This replacement could be all you need to resolve your problem

Kind Regards,
  Kostas