Linux Kernel Archives or ELRepo
Hello All
I am currently working through my RHCSA and RHCE and ive purchased red hat 7.4 workstation, my only issue with it has been that the kernel and xorg don't want to co operate with my nvidia drivers, ive troubleshooted till im blue in the face and haven't been able to get it to work automatically with the latest release kernel from redhat.
If anyone would like to give their 2 cents on it ill post the link to the thread i created for it.
As a workaround ive used the lts kernel from elrepo which works as expected but since im learning to build rpm's etc im considering compiling a custom kernel for my machine from the linux kernel archive just as a learning opportunity.
Can someone please tell me if there are any caveats or precautions i should be aware of ? or for safety reasons am i better off with elrepo if i need a non official kernel ?
Kind Regards
Responses
The ELRepo kernel is just the upstream kernel with a config that has a few minor changes and specfile which works well with the rest of EL, plus a couple of useful features (eg: I asked ELRepo to enable RPC debugging to aid troubleshooting NFS stuff on their kernel).
If you make defconfig and diff that with the /boot/config-x.x.x on the corresponding version of the the ELRepo kernel-ml RPM you'll see the differences in the config, there shouldn't be many.
I find ELRepo's kernel is useful to go back the other way. When I need to test something on Linus's tree or a newer subsystem tree (eg: net-next) then I start with the ELRepo config file then make olddefconfig to wind up with a useful kernel config, then I compile that.
Getting back to your question, I think you'd be better to use ELRepo's kernel on your system, and concentrate your study on making RPMs which provide userspace programs. In real life as a system administrator, you're much more likely to be packaging up your organization's own applications and config files, not making custom kernels, so I'd focus on the more realistic scenario and just treat the kernel as a "just works" black box for now.
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