hey,
i just upgraded my kernel and everythings work great, but my questions is how does my system know which kernel goes with which files in the boot directory. For example for my 2.6.10 kernel i have 3 files, called vmlinuz, conifg, System.map (of courese all links to x-2.6.10 where x is the name) But how does my system know to boot to my older 2.4.22 kernel, i have the same three files, but they are all named x.ide-2.4.22. does all 3 files need to be named in the same format for the system to boot different kernels.

Another thing can I have as many kernel as they want or will lilo get mad?

thanks,
djgerbavore

you can have as many kernels as you'd like (keeping within certain hardware constraints) -- Lilo (or Grub) is what tells your system where/what the kernels are.

When you are booting, the only file you need is the kernel. System.map is needed by a few things, like klogd and actually does an advance search in /boot /usr/src/linux and / to find it, looks the kernel name etc. The config file is not needed at all. It's just the file that has your kernel configuration. It's really usefull since you can use it to recompile your kernel without having to configure everything from scratch.

I think you may have as many kernels as you want. I've seen people having 4 -5 kernels, but i think you may have a lot more.

okay thanks....


That makes sense,


also, do i need soundcore as a module to get my sound working in linux?? (using ALSA drivers and util)


djgerbavor3

For naming of the files in /boot i always use. :

for 2.6.9 kernel : vmlinuz-2.6.9 and System.map-2.6.9

( and so-on for all other kernels. )

the config-files i keep in my home dir. as : config-2.6.9 ( etc. )
this is handy as i found out last week .
on Slack 10.1 install i formatted my /boot partition ( oops ), but
with all the config files in the home-dir. i had a working kernel
without a prob. in no time.

and for the alsa modules: some time ago it was needed to keep them as modules ( and i always do that ) but i don't know if that's still true.

egag

The answer is yes. Anyway do /sbin/lsmod, to see all the modules running.
Check the "used by" entry.