Some experiences upgrading my kernel from 2.4.28 to 2.6.11.8

Hi All,

I've just spent some time upgrading the kernel on my Miata box
from 2.4.28 to 2.6.11.8.  I thought I'd share my thoughts and
perhaps encourage others who're keen to try this.

0.  Getting the information
I used these links -- they were fantastic.  Thanks a lot to the authors.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/migration-to-2.6.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml

1.  Getting up to date
I did the "emerge -ua world" to bring my whole system up to date.
sendmail-8.13.3 and strace-4.5.11 wouldn't build.  Anyone seen this?
Neither of these are important to a kernel upgrade, of course, so I
carried on.

2.  Getting the source.
Using "emerge gentoo-sources" failed with the error
"All ebuilds that could satisfy "gentoo-sources" have been masked"
I used "emerge vanilla-sources", and got the source unpacked in
/usr/src/linux-2.6.11.8.

Should there be a gentoo-sources for alphas?

3.  Configuring and building.
No problems there; just follow the linked documents carefully.

4.  Booting.
I had some problems booting.  First, I configured my kernel for
my system type (miata).  This kernel hung while booting (I think in the
keyboard initialization code).  I had the same problem with 2.4.x
kernels on this box; the solution then was to rebuild with the
system-type set to "generic".  This worked.

The second problem was that I had problems with devices.  This
turned out to be a mistake I made in configuring the kernel.
A more careful reading of the udev page sorted this out.

The third problem I had was relatively minor.  My eth0 and eth1
were switched around, and all network services (and the firewall setup)
were seriously confused.  This just required editing the appropriate
files in /etc.  Perhaps a word in one of the docs might help
others who get stuck at this point?

Other than that, my alpha's happy and has been up for an hour now.

Thanks people for all the hard work!

Andrew.

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