Compiling A Non-Bloated Kernel
 

Hey all,

I just finished compiling my first new kernel(Yay! :) ). Now I want to try and go back and take out what I don't need. I know I have a lot of stuff compiled in that I will never use.

Before I do this, though, I was wondering if I uncheck a setting and then compile it and it doesn't work. I know I can use the kernel before the new one to boot, add that setting back into my kernel. But when I compile it, can I just run make to compile the new setting or do I have to run mrproper, to clear all the stuff from the old compile and recompile the entire kernel again? I noticed one time I ran make without mrproper and it went by really fast, but I wasn't sure if it created what I needed or not.

Thanks,
Chris

A lot of this depends on several things. Oh, and be careful, 'make mrproper' deletes your kernel config too.

On 2.4 kernels, it was generally considered that a 'make clean' was really needed before rebuilding. With 2.6 kernels, the dependency tracking has been greatly improved, and a 'make' should be fine. Makes after the first should be faster, because source files with no configuration changes don't need to be recompiled: the existing object files (file.o) can just be linked into the final version.

Awesome, that's really good to know. Heh, I must have forgotten to mention in my first post that the kernel I compiled was the 2.6.13.1 kernel. But it looks like I have to go back to a 2.6.12 kernel in order to get my damn ATI drivers working :-\. It's more practice I suppose.

Anyway, thanks for the response. :)

Which ATI drivers are you trying to use? The Xorg or XFree ones, or the proprietary ones written by ATI?

And yeah, mentioning a kernel version in a thread about compiling a kernel might be helpful. *grin* But I answered it for both version to help future searchers/readers.

I am trying to get the proprietary ones from ATI to work. Unfortunately it is not going too well. I finally got Xorg to start, before it would not even start, it just froze. However, when I run the glxgears test program I get about 2000FPS(not sure if thats good or not).

When I run the fgl_glxgears test program I get about .663 - .8 FRS. (That is less than ONE FPS). The fgl_glxgears program does give me this error over and over and over as it runs:

I am not sure what that means, maybe someone else could help? I installed the latest ATI drivers and I am using kernel 2.6.12 and Xorg 8.6.2.

Thanks

You need to enable POSIX shared memory.

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/li...st.html#176878
(See "3D Applications Produce Open of Shared Memory Object Failed Error Message" for how to enable POSIX shared memory).