Yet another newbie question, even though I use linux for a while.

It stared like a real detective story. I recompiled the kernel, did installation, restarted the system and everything went surprisingly smoothly. I did some more changes and suddenly it all crashed! When I booted, the system complained on some linux partitions, kept running fsck, which always failed and rebooted endlessly. Also my USB keyboard was not recognized, I had to attach my old PS/2 one.

It took me a while until I figured out the problem. The kernel modules coming with my Mandriva 2008 distribution are all stored gzipped (e.g. usbkbd.ko.gz), but for the new build kernel, "make modules_install" didn't gzip them. I gzipped them manually in expectation that modutils are smart enough to figure that out. Apparently depmod and modprobe work OK on gzipped modules, but some others don't.

What is the proper way to keep ALL modules gzipped ?

Regards
M-

You're right, the kernel install doesn't gzip modules. Whether you can handle gzipped modules or not is determined by your modules tools (how they were built). When you build them (or whoever built them), you need to pass the gzip parameter to the configure script. I forgot what it is exactly, but 'configure --help' will show it.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kern...3-pre1.tar.bz2

If you're using some distro, there's likely a 'package' of them; hopefully the maintainer included gzip support.

When you install a new kernel, you can use a 'find' command with '-name' and '-exec' to find and gzip all the modules for you. Then, run depmod with it pointing to the new system map with the new kernel version, something like 'depmod -e -F /boot/System.map 2.6.23.1'. Then you should be all set. You might want to compile in USB/keyboard, since the keyboard is a critical system component.

Thank you jayjwa indeed.

The question was pending for such a long time, that I (almost) completely lost any hope to get a reply

Yes, I tried make help | grep zip. There are some options for building kernel in zip, rpm, debian, etc, but as fas as I understand it is done to the kernel only (after it has been build) for a mere distrib convenience and has nothing to do with the module installation.

It might really have to do with the way of running depmod (I didn't supply the reference to System.map), I might check it, but this is such a disaster (it is not only about USB keyboard, but about some FS supported in modules), that I better wait

As a matter of fact, with the new version of gzip, you can simply say gzip -r *ko, and no there is no need to use find. Some drivers can be build into the kernel, and, as far as I remember, USB kbd might be one of those.

Once again thanks a lot. Now I at least have a plan ....