Hi,

I am currently running Mandriva 2005 LE. I want to recompile my kernel (2.6.11-6mdk) as I believe this will speed up my system (please correct me if I am wrong).

Could someone please provide me with the steps needed to recompile my kernel. Here is what I think I need to do:

cd /usr/src/linux
su - (password)
make mrproper
make clean
make xconfig
make dep
make bzImage

After this, what do I do?

When I run the make xconfig, does a dot next to the item (as opposed to a check) mean that it's selected or not? Also, I don't want to mess anything up. I unchecked obvious things (ISA support, Bluetooth support, etc). Is there anything I can change (check/uncheck) to help out?

Thanks.

Ryan

then you'll need to cp your bzImage to /boot

if your using grub or lilo edit the config to correspond to your kernel, (prob best to make 2 entries and keep your old kernel in there incase the new kernel fails.)

EDIT: I have never done make bzimage before, with gentoo I just do make && make modules_install and then I cp my bzImage to /boot

You'll probably want to do make dep && make modules_install. You also get a System.map file that you need to copy to /boot. It appears in the directory where you execute make xconfig from, not where the new kernel is.

I agree with GUIPenguin's suggestion to keep your old kernel in the bootloader in case the new one doesn't work quite right.

If you just want to fine tune your kernel for performance it helps to know a lot about your hardware, especially specific chipsets. For example, not just what type of soundcard you have, but the type of chip that controls it. And if you have USBv1.1 or 2.0. 1.1 uses the ohci driver while 2.0 uses ehci so you only need one or the other. Try not to include everything builtin, only the most important things, and make the rest modules. This will keep your kernel smaller so it'll load faster. If you use lilo as the bootloader you can include compact and lba32 options to load the kernel faster also. I don't know if grub has equivalents.

Here's how I compile my kernel recently due to an update in the patchset I use that I wanted.
You don't need to worry about the patch stuff, once you've done that you'll need to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst.