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compiling and installing linux kernels

Hello,

I have downloaded the newest most stable Linux kernel, 2.6.33.2.

I thought I would test this using VirtualBox. So I create a dynamically sized hard disk of 4 GB. And installed CentOS 5.3 with just the minimum packages, just the development libs and development tools.

I unzipped in the /usr/src directory.

I setup the make menuconfig with just the default settings.

After that I ran make and got the following error:

Code:

net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o: final close failed: No space left on device

make[2]: *** [net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o] Error 1

make[1]: *** [net/bluetooth] Error 2

make: *** [net] Error 2

The amount of space I have left is after it give that error is:

Code:

# df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

                      3.3G  3.3G    0 100% /

/dev/hda1              99M  12M  82M  13% /boot

tmpfs                125M    0  125M  0% /dev/shm

So my virtual harddisk size is 4gb and the actual size if 3.5gb. So what happened to the other 500mb?

How much size should I give when compiling and installing a Linux kernel? Are there any guidelines to follow when doing this? This is my first time, so just experimenting with this.

Many thanks,

Quote:

Originally Posted by ukwho (Post 3934172)

So my virtual harddisk size is 4gb and the actual size if 3.5gb. So what happened to the other 500mb?

Some of the file system is reserved for use by the file system. Also, you may be seeing the problem of "hard drive" math versus "o/s math". Hard drives report their size using 1000 as the divisor for KB, MB, GB, etc. Operating systems report the size of the file system using 1024 as the divisor.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ukwho (Post 3934172)

How much size should I give when compiling and installing a Linux kernel?

If you did a full install of CentOS, you probably need a file system that is between 8 GB and 12 GB if you want to build kernels. In my experience, after a build, a kernel source tree uses around 4 GB of space.