Geek projects, tidbits and things I'm working on at the moment…

So I’ve expanded my SCST compiles onto other Linux OSes namely Fedora 14 & Red Hat 6.0 and I’ve come across another issue when attempting to get the modified kernel to compile, namely it doesn’t pass the precompile check and never fully assembles into a binary! This one took me a while to figure out but thankfully Google provides for those that seek…

The errors I was seeing were similar to below:

linux/X64/usr/include/drm/drm_mode.h:85: found __[us]{8,16,32,64} type without #include

linux/X64/usr/include/drm/i915_drm.h:120: found __[us]{8,16,32,64} type without #include

linux/X64/usr/include/drm/mga_drm.h:260: found __[us]{8,16,32,64} type without #include

linux/X64/usr/include/drm/radeon_drm.h:758: found __[us]{8,16,32,64} type without #include

linux/X64/usr/include/drm/via_drm.h:117: found __[us]{8,16,32,64} type without #include

linux/X64/usr/include/scsi/scsi_netlink.h:108: found __[us]{8,16,32,64} type without #include

linux/X64/usr/include/linux/resource.h:49: found __[us]{8,16,32,64} type without #include

Essentially a precompiler option #include was messing things up. Thankfully someone over on kernel.org found it and knew what to do about it. You’ve got to do your make menuconfig, make your new .config file then edit it w/ vi. Search for a line stating CONFIG_HEADERS_CHECK=y and make it =n instead.

After that it was smooth sailing and the kernel compiled just fine on Red Hat 6.0 & Fedora 14. I eventually had another problem w/ Fedora 14 down the road but installing redhat-lsb via yum solved that problem (had to do w/ the initial functions that are included in Linux Standard Base!)

Here’s the link I found regarding the compile issue:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/274141/

I’m in the process of building up a SAN from scratch using SCST & CentOS. I’ve played around w/ kernels in the past but hadn’t done it in a while. When downloading 2.6.36.2 from Kernel.org recently I couldn’t get a bootable kernel no matter what I did w/ CentOS (and yes, I did load the CentOS .config file into menuconfig before compiling my kernel.)

  Come to find out, because CentOS is using a modified 2.6.18 kernel that little .config file is very out dated. As of kernel 2.6.31 a new kernel parameter is available called “enable deprecated sysfs features to support old userspace tools” which is under the General setup area. Once I enabled that option, I was good to go. It has something to do with why my SAS RAID card wasn’t getting picked up upon boot up. Everything else after that was a piece of cake!

You could have also just added this to your .config file. (NOTE: Hats off to Vanecka!)
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2=y

Couple Kernel compile links for CentOS 5:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Custom_Kernel  (official CentOS wiki kernel build page)
http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_centos_p2  (HowtoForge article)
http://kerneltrap.org/node/1783 (Old kernel trap article which mentions the use of -j8 for make parameters so you’ll use all of your cores on compiles! I did a ‘make -j8 all’ and finished my kernel compile in under 5 minutes on a Xenon E5620 CPU!)
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/6.4/chapter08/kernel.html (LFS link on kernel compile)