why should I upgrade my kernel

rikell42 · Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 12:09 am Post subject: why should I upgrade my kernel

I am running kernel 2.6.7

I know that this is some what out of date and that I could spend a weekend figuring out how to upgrade it with out losing all the tweeking I did to it when I first installed gentoo some months ago.

is there really any reason to upgrade?

teknomage1 · Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 12:13 am Post subject:

unless there's a security advisory or a new feature you want you never have to upgrade. So if you're not feeling it, don't sweat it.

dontremember · Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 12:38 am Post subject:

Rad · Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 3:30 am Post subject:

Well there are performance and hardware support related improvements besides security fixes...
And it won't hurt to try a new kernel; even if there's no problems at all. Just keep the old kernel, and If the new one doesn't work, you just boot that one again.

If by "tweaks" you meant settings rather than patches: Well, upgrading without loosing settings is not much work. You just copy .config from the old kerneldir to the new one, issue "make oldconfig" in the new kerneldir to decide about the new kernel options and then proceed with installation as usual; except that you can skip further configuration if you don't want to do that. Meaning you can just compile and copy System.map & bzImage to /boot afterwards.

If, however, "tweaks" meant special patches, you can try looking at the unsupported software forum to see wheter anybody already made a good patchset or write some "epatch" lines into some official ebuild you copied into your overlaydir (which should make upgrades easier from when it's done).

boogerman · Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 7:51 am Post subject:

If I remember right there was a huge security hole in the 2.4 kernel that was fixed in the 2.4.25 release, and the release of the 2.6.5 had a huge speed increase, didn't it?

Basically there are four reasons to upgrade your kernel:
1 support for new devices
2 speed
3 security
4 fun

Of course the orders of importance are different for different people according to their needs (mine is 4123, yes, 4 being first).

Pretty much, I upgrade my kernel whenever there is something I want to try doing with the kernel and there is a new release. I'm currently up to 2.6.11-r9, as I did a project yesterday. Anyway, that's my speach on the whole thing.

nevynxxx · Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 9:50 am Post subject:

Just for future reference. To make the tweeking less of a hassle, when you configure your kernel, make sure the option "store config in /proc" (or something like that, I'm not sure of the exact option) is selected.

This means that you can then, download, unpack your kernel. Then run