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> For me just getting it complied in a vm was an ordeal You're right, the process of building and installing a custom kernel is much harder than it used to be
by zbuf 10y ago
> For me just getting it complied in a vm was an ordeal
You're right, the process of building and installing a custom kernel is much harder than it used to be 10-15 years ago.
And I believe this is a problem that impacts a certain kind of contribution. Because even for the most experienced and competent of programmers, the bar for entry is too high.
The distributions are partly to blame here. The complexity of initrd setups have meant that testing even a small or single line change is an ordeal. The wrapping in package managers like RPM makes incremental builds of a kernel impossible.
My personal setup is based on Slackware without an initd; a kernel build resembles a 'make; make install' like it has been for the past 15+ years. I've been unable to achieve anything similar in reasonable time on a CentOS system.
- digi_owl 10y agoAnd it will get worse. Just about every idea that is coming out of Gnome/Freedesktop these days assumes a massive initramfs. To bootstrap systemd they even have a copy of dbus crammed in there. And the (ab)use of initramfs is what has lead to the push for just cramming everything into /usr.
- hyperion2010 10y agoI've been using Gentoo for 10 years and have been configing, building, and installing (and occasionally patching) kernels for that entire time. For me it has gotten much easier now that you can use an efi stub kernel to install. That said I agree that it can be too much because most distros don't make it easy and 'hello world' is often the hardest program you will ever write.
- fit2rule 10y agoI dunno, I've been a Linux kernel guy since Linus posted to the minix-list, and I have to say that things seem easier than ever. I mean, pick your distro, figure out how it boots the kernel, use it to build a new kernel, boot it. Repeat, ad infinitum. The problem seems to be a rather hefty "NIMBY" factor, imho. If you want to get into the kernel these days, you have to realize: its a done thing. Nobody cares if you're a rockstar. Learn the tooling and methodology, or gtfo...