Hi,

first I must say I am not any experienced SUSE user/admin, but my friend asked me to help him with his SUSE 9.2 notebook (I use Debian and/or Gentoo on my machines).

Currently the latest official kernel package for SUSE 9.2 is based on the 2.6.8 kernel while there is a 2.6.11.5 kernel available from kernel.org. I compiled new kernel (and generated the initrd) from 2.6.11.5 sources, using the config from SUSE kernel 2.6.8-24.11-default (extracted from /proc/config.gz). The machine starts up with the new kernel, everything seems to work fine but the system reports a few error messages during the startup:
I don't think any of these errors is critical, but I'd like to get rid of them.
All these problems are probably because of some kernel patches missing.

Finally, here is my question:
Is there any way to find what patches are used in the SUSE kernels? I would like to patch the new kernel to be 100% compatible with the official SUSE kernels. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Lukas.

"Is there any way to find what patches are used in the SUSE kernels? "

Here are the SuSE kernel patches:

http://search.belnet.be/packages/sus...ernel-patches/

--------------------------
Steve Stites

Nope, there are options unavailabe in older kernels plus SuSE kernel is highly customized, so several options from SuSE kernel are not available in vanilla.

1. vanilla kernel
2. get submount (if you want SuSE-like automount, for SuSE is better than supermount) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/submount/. The latest version is 0.9
You can install submount only from running new kernel

If you want to try once more then go to .../linux-2.6.11.5 and issue:
#make clean && make proper

Now, configure kernel
If you want to use original config file as a guide open it in your favorite editor, but dont use is as a .config file

While configuring kernel, get rid of all unnecessary stuff, otherwise your new kernel will eat a lot of memory. Remember that although customized default SuSE kernel has a lot of stuff you don't need.


Don't use old patches for kernel 2.6.8 in kernel 2.6.11.x that is quite obvious.

OK, I'm gonna try doing my own configuration. I thought I could save some time using the SUSE .config. Also it is not my computer so I don't know all the hardware details to choose all correct modules. Anyway, I'm gonna try that. I'll let you know how/if it works

I am pretty surprised SUSE doesn't release the kernel updates more frequently. My main distro is Gentoo and it has new kernel package (with gentoo specific patches) just a few days after the kerel release...

Thanks for your help.

Lukas.

well, gentoo is constant experiment that sometime works sometime something is broken
SuSE is stable.
Whatever is you distro this is linux so procedure is mainly the same:
run
#lspci
next run:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo

the above will give you hardware information you need for kernel config

Configure kernel next run something like:

export CHOST=“i686-pc-linux-gnu”
export CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -funroll-all-loops -funit-at-a-time -fpeel-loops -ftracer -funswitch-loops -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fweb"
export CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
export MAKEOPTS="-j2"

assuming that this is Intel. Adjust for AMD or 64-bit. Remember that -O3 should be avoided on 64-bit because either will not compile or what worse wil kompile bad. If plenty of RAM and speedy CPU you can try "-j6"

copy, configure GRUB and after restart to the new kernel install submount. That is all. Pretty simple.

Great. Thanks.

It is an older Celeron (P3) running at 1GHz, with just 256MB RAM, so I think I should set MAKEOPTS="-j2".
gcc could be set -march=pentium3 -O2 (you say -O3, but I've heard that it can make some apps unstable...???)

Yes, you're right that stability is one of the main goals of SUSE. I have planned to switch approx. 20 office PCs in our company from Windows to Linux, and couldn't decide which distro to choose. Maybe this little excercise with my friend's SUSE notebook would ensure me that SUSE could be the right choice. I must say that I like it very much, especially all the YaST tools work fine

"make proper"? You mean "make mrproper"?

Thanks again for your help.

Lukas.

OK. It seems to work, although I still neeed to make some fine tuning in the kernel configuration. Thanks for helping.

yes, that was "mrproper" not "proper" sorry for the mistake.
In case of laptop with limited RAM, I would really trim down kernel options to the stuff needed now. Is really ipv6 needed? Is he using NFS or samba, does he needs all fs compiled? And so on and so for.
you can compile kernel only with -O3 that might be helpful, the rest, he can compile with -O2. However there isnothing wrong with kernel -O2 obviously.
Good luck with optimizations.

Hi, I'm back again

You mentioned IPv6, which is the thing I want to ask about. Of course IPv6 is not needed, but the SuSEfirewall2 seems to require it:
So I added the IPv6 netfilter support to the kernel, all errors vanished except Module ip_conntrack not found. The IPv6 version of this module is not present in the vanilla sources, the original SuSE 2.6.8-24.11-default has it as module using CONFIG_IP6_NF_CONNTRACK=m .config setting. I cannot find this option in the vanilla sources - SuSE probably adds it using a kernel patch.

Can I totally remove the SuSEfirewall2? It is not needed because the notebook runs in a LAN that is firewalled.

Sure. you can remove SuSEfirewall2, however, because this is laptop, then for mobile computers is better to have firewall. The errors of SuSEfirewall2 are benign, you don't have ipv6 tha is all. You can try to run
echo "alias net-pf-10 off" >> /etc/modprobe.conf
echo "alias ipv6 off" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

additionally try:
/etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2
FW_IPv6=""
change to
FW_IPv6="no"
Above should stop SuSEfirewall2 from trying to set any ipv6 rules.
eventually if these errors really gets on your nerves edit
/sbin/SuSEfirewall2 and delete from line:
load_module ip_tables ip_conntrack ip_conntrack_ftp ip_nat_ftp ip6table_filter ip6table_mangle

text about ipv6 so it will look like:
load_module ip_tables ip_conntrack ip_conntrack_ftp ip_nat_ftp

Maybe there is a trick to get rid of this one too, however I never bothered to lokk for possible resolution: The above warning is true even if ipv6 is enabled.


If you will have problems with SuSEfirewall2 then use Yast -> Security and Users -> Firewall and select option "Stop and remove from boot"

While experimenting with a new kernel, try grsecurity patch or LIDS, as far as I know SElinux under SuSE may breake some things so it should be turned off.

Hope that it will help a little.

A little? LOL. You helped me a lot! I really appreciate it.
I'll be working on it tonight.

Lukas.

This is irrelevant sentence, it was quite late sorry.

If you want to try gresecurity, the patch is here:
grsecurity patch

Pay attention to the options that may kill X.