Re: Ques. Regarding s390 kernel Compilation..

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 01:15:27 -0800 (PST)
Anoop Chandran <[email protected]> wrote:

> I am in the process of upgrading the default RH 7.2
> kernel avaialable for s390.
> I've downloaded the latest 2.4.24 kernel, which i need
> to compile and install.
> 
> while looking for any pointers in this regard,I came
> across ur post in RH-s390.

I'm cc-ing this back to the list as you should've done.
And try to spel "your" correctly, too.

> However, the post describes only the compilation
> instructions. 
> 
> I would like to know how to install this newly
> compiled kernel and start my linux image to use the
> same.

It's only a little different from a regular Linux kernel installation.
Key differences are:
 1. Image in arch/s390/boot/image is used (uncompressed)
 2. /etc/zipl.conf is used instead of /etc/lilo.conf

A useful trick when playing with kernels on s390 is to use
several DASDs to boot several zipl.conf-s, using zipl -c foo.conf.
This allows experimenting under z/VM without ever booting CMS,
and FTP-ing into CMS is a royal pain. This is very important,
because your first kernel is likely to be broken in some regard.
If you overwrite the one and only /etc/zipl.conf, you're screwed.

> Also, is it required that any patch (from ibm/redhat)
> be applied to the kernel source before compiling it on
> s390 system ?

Possibly. Depends if you run an application which requires
some extension. I would just try running it as-is, it should
be good enough. I do not remember if 2.4.9-38 includes anything
that was generally useful or necessary (for a mainframe).

IBM post updates to DeveloperWorks website and they are notoriously
poor at feeding them to Marcelo. You might want to check those,
but I think they mostly concern with new hardware support, such
as zfcp.

-- Pete