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Chapter 9

Debian and the kernel

9.1 Can I install and compile a kernel without some Debian specific

tweaking?

Yes.

There's only one common catch: the Debian C libraries are built with the most recent stable

releases of the kernel headers. If you happen to need to compile a program with kernel head 

ers newer than the ones from the stable branch, then you should either upgrade the package

containing the headers (

libc6 dev

), or use the new headers from an unpacked tree of the

newer kernel. That is, if the kernel sources are in

/usr/src/linux

, then you should add

 I/usr/src/linux/include/

to your command line when compiling.

9.2 What tools does Debian provide to build custom kernels?

Users who wish to (or must) build a custom kernel are encouraged to download the package

kernel package

. This package contains the script to build the kernel package, and provides

the capability to create a Debian kernel image package just by running the command

make kpkg kernel_image

in the top level kernel source directory. Help is available by executing the command

make kpkg   help

and through the manual page

make kpkg(8)

.

Users must separately download the source code for the most recent kernel (or the kernel of

their choice) from their favorite Linux archive site, unless a kernel source version package is

available (where  version  stands for the kernel version).