I've spent a few hours recently looking at building RPM packages of GNU/Linux kernels, which has been a frustrating process.
There are many many online guides which give the impression that this is actually a pretty complex process. For example How To Compile A Kernel - The CentOS Way guide. (Did I mention how bad most of the howtoforge guides are recently?)
So, after fiddling around for an afternoon and getting lost I decided to abandon the process.
Here is a tested process for building a binary RPM kernel package:
cd linux-2.6.24.7/ make rpm
Yes this works just fine upon a Centos 5.x machine - I'm used to using make-kpkg to make a Debian kernel package, but it seems that if you just visit kernel.org and download the latest version you can build a RPM without any extra effort thanks to native support. Cool.
Now I need to work out how to create, host, and update a YUM repository. That looks fiddly and annoying too. XML. Eww. Any guides are most welcome - ultimately I need to package and host a "recent" kernel for Centos 4.x, Centos 5.x and Fedora Core 6-9 - each for i386 + amd64.
ObQuote: Spiderman
Tags: rpm, work, yum 3 comments