I'm using SLES 10 SP3 i386. I needed to increase the number of tape drives from the default of 128 to 600. So, I edited st.h, and changed the value in the "#define ST_MAX_TAPES" line to 600. I followed these steps to rebuild the kernel:

make oldconfig
make
make modules_install
make install
mkinitrd
reboot

When I rebooted, I noticed that my kernel (which uses the 'bigsmp' machinery) did not have the 600 tape value. Looking in /boot, I saw (by the modification date) that the bigsmp vmlinuz* file had not been updated, but the 'default' file machinery had been updated. So, I changed the grub file, booted the 'default' kernel, and saw that it did have the 600 tape limit.

So, why would 'default' get updated, but the 'bigsmp' not get updated by the make/mkinitrd process?

Thanks!
tl

Hi, Unless you do a make xconfig or make menuconfig the .config file is saved in situ (in place) /usr/src/linux/..).

Generally, I have to make/adjust the symlinks in /boot to use the right kernel image.

See how you go, Glenn

Thank you very much for this suggestion. I ran 'make menuconfig' and selected the options to use up to 64 GB of memory. I rebooted, and now /proc/meminfo shows "MemTotal: 49857668 kB".

So this did accomplish the purpose of configuring the kernel to use all of the memory.

But I still wonder how I could have used the 'bigsmp' machinery to have both a big-memory kernel and a small-memory kernel on the system, ready to boot either.

Thanks!
tl