Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!gatech!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!news.belwue.de!news.uni-stuttgart.de!uniol!uni-erlangen.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: compiling 2.2-current Date: 22 Jun 1996 10:27:41 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 67 Message-ID: <4qghqt$q31@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4p7dcj$afk@newsserv.cs.sunysb.edu> <4pfle0$3to@keltia.freenix.fr> <4q339i$5kc@news.clinet.fi> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E mickey@cantina.clinet.fi (Mika Ruohotie) wrote: > what would be the proper way to upgrade a system, when i am making some > major changes, i always first compile a kernel, then i make world, and then > i make the kernel again... That sounds reasonable. I'm also often doing it this way, of course, i boot the first kernel after making, in order to see whether it would boot at all. (Otherwise, the `make world' will be wasted time.) Something i regularly stumple across: the old lkm's won't work at the first reboot since they are still the old ones... This is quite clear, they become a part of the kernel once they are loaded, but that did already often cause me some panic. :] > also how often one should make world on current? Some people never do. Some of us actually prefer to understand what happens, and do all the steps manually. `make world' is a safe version that doesn't have any knowledge about the system's history, and thus first cleans out everything. In particular for slower machines, this is annoying, so a make -k and manual error recovery might be better. > should one change kernelmore often that that? This depends. If you've read in the commit logs or on the -current mailing list (where i hope you are subscribed to) about some new nifty feature you wanna have (or test), you might upgrade your kernel from time to time. I generally avoid upgrading in times when the system is known to be not quite stable (like after the most recent VM changes), since i rely on my machine being available also when i'm not at home. YMMV. I sometimes also do partial upgrades, e.g. on my machine at work, i upgraded the entire system, but then reverted the VM files to the date just before John Dyson committed his big VM changes. This led to a rather stable kernel with all the new stuff except the VM changes in it. Of course, you need to have a good insight on what is happening to the system if you wanna pick this route. > how about making all the binaries (/usr/local/bin) again, how often would I normally never do, except for binaries that are known to fail. The changes in the shared libs are picked by them automatically where appropriate. The worst offender is top, since it much depends on kernel interna. It's not even shareable between machines with different versions of the system. > oh, last one, my linux friend thinks i'm strange coz i compile my system > and am not using ready binaries... That's your problem. :-) Or theirs. :-)) Recompiling yourself makes you sure you've got the source in case of troubles, and not only that, it makes you sure you've got _exactly_ _the_ source, not just ``any source''. If something breaks and you need to fix it, you can quickly go to /usr/src, spot the problem in the source, and fix it. Ask your Linux friends what they would do in the same situation... ;-) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)