Hi. I have a question about md5sum and the kernel.

I use gentoo, and I use the genkernel method of creating the kernel.

I recently had some weird errors on booting that generated kernel crash or oops, and it was unexplainable to me. I had not changed kernel configuration, nor had updated to a newer kernel.

I booted into my liveCD and ran md5sum on the kernel and the initramfs.
Saved the sums and ran genkernel and compared the md5sum of the kernel and initramfs to the new one, and they were different.

If the kernel version was still the same and no options had been changed via menuconfig, shouldn't the resulting md5sum have been the same?

What could this be indicative of?

Thank You.

Within the compiled kernel there is a timestamp generated by the compiler. The initramfs is generated for your system configuration when the kernel is installed. Neither of those files will be identical to what is on the live CD.

Don't get crazy about this. They are distinct files, so they will never have the same md5. The problem would come if they did.