Linux Kernel Testing （from a foreigner）

Building and performance testing 2.6-rc the latest release candidate kernel on Ubuntu Feisty

It started when Henry passed me a good guide.
about testing and performance

I did the following:

ian@lawrence:~/Dev/Indt/Kernel/$ sudo apt-get install bootchart ketchup

Bootchart

is a tool for performance analysis and
visualization of the GNU/Linux boot process.

Ketchup

is a little command-line tool to manage
your Linux kernel sources.
If you're one of the weirdos, who is still
compiling his kernel manually for whatever
reason (like I do), I can only recommend it.

Ketchup nicely eases up the entire process of
checking for updates and applying them to
your system.

Configure and Compile

ian@lawrence:~/Dev/Indt/Kernel/$ mkdir tree; cd tree

ian@lawrence:~/Dev/Indt/Kernel/tree$ ketchup 2.6-rc

This downloads the latest "release candidate"
kernel.
You can check if you really have the latest
stable tree by:
$ ketchup -m
2.6.22.3

It's a good idea to use the configuration of
your current working kernel as a basis for
your new kernel. Therefore we copy the
existing configuration to the top of the tree:

ian@lawrence:~/Dev/Indt/Kernel/tree$ sudo cp /boot/config-`uname -r` ./.config

Then we run

ian@lawrence:~/Dev/Indt/Kernel/tree$ make menuconfig

For all possible options on this menu look at:

http://www.tlug.org.za/old/guides/lkcg/lkcg_config.html

When building the kernel to test it, you should
seriously consider setting the options located in
the ”Kernel hacking” menu. At least, you should
set:

[*] Compile the kernel with debug info

The other options should also be set, if
possible, because they help debug specific
function- alities of the kernel, but some of
them hurt performance, so you may want to
leave them unset:

[*] Debug shared IRQ handlers

[*] Detect Soft Lockups

[*] Debug slab memory allocations

[*] Slab memory leak debugging

[*] RT Mutex debugging, deadlock detection

[*] Built-in scriptable tester for rt-mutexes

[*] Lock debugging: prove locking correctness

[*] Lock dependency engine debugging

[*] Locking API boot-time self-tests

[*] Highmem debugging

[*] Debug VM

Build The Kernel

ian@lawrence:~/Dev/Indt/Kernel/tree$ sudo make-kpkg clean

and as root:

root@lawrence:/home/ian/Dev/Indt/Kernel/tree# fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-ian kernel_image

After --append-to-version= you can write any
string that helps you identify the kernel, but it
must begin with a minus (-) and must not
contain whitespace.

Now be patient, the kernel compilation can
take some hours, depending on your kernel
configuration and your processor speed.

Install

root@lawrence:/home/ian/Dev/Indt/Kernel# dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.22.3-ian_2.6.22.3-ian-10.00.Custom_i386.deb 

reboot

This automagically puts an entry in your /boot/grub/menu.lst
and the bootchart app we installed at the start
makes a nice visualization of the boot performance
in /var/log/bootchart when we reboot