Append to Kernel Release

[BigPalabra]

When configuring a Kernel manually (make menuconfig), what is for "Local version - append to kernel release" and "Automatically append version information to the version string" options ???

Regards.

[Sadako]

The first option changes, amongst other things, what is reported by uname, and also where the modules for the running kernel are found (ie the subdirectory in /lib/modules/).

This is useful if you are running more than one version of an identical release/revision, for example my currently running kernel I've manually patched with a patchset to add transparent compression to ext2, so I added "-e2compr" to the local version string, and uname now reports "2.6.25-hardened-r2-e2compr".

This can be very useful, for (another) example I learned the hard way that modules compiled for a kernel using sparse memory are incompatible with kernels using flat memory, even if everything else is identical, so this option would have been very useful to me when testing SPARSEMEM out.

As for the "Automatically append version information to the version string", this appears to only really be useful for live git ebuilds, adding the git revision to the kernel's version number, but there may be other uses.

HTH.
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[BigPalabra]

THX A LOT !!