[Haifux] Kernel for Fedora: Repository or vanilla?

[Eli Billauer]

Oron Peled wrote:

> My conclusion -- either join the ride (I'm doing it for years) or look for
> one of the slower alternatives I mentioned in my earlier post.
>   
Thanks for your input, Oron, even though my conclusion was the opposite: 
I just jumped off the ride, before it reaches its final station. I don't 
want to be updated. So I suppose that by stopping updates now, I'll have 
one upgrade left in the repository (which I'll download in its entity 
sooner or later), so I can do small fixes as necessary easily (as was 
necessary with mencoder, which didn't take data from stdin due to a 
short-lived bug).

So my choice was to download a 2.6.35.4 kernel from kernel.org, and use 
Fedora's configuration as a starting point. The only major change I did 
was to activate the NTFS filesystem in my kernel, which isn't even a 
module in the distribution kernel. I wonder why not.

I used dracut to create my own initramfs file, which turned out 16 MB 
instead of their 12 MB. That's necessary, since my root filesystem is 
encrypted, so a password prompt is necessary. And since Fedora thought 
it would be cool to do that with a pretty graphical interface, a lot has 
to be in place to support that, and hence that massive RAM disk. But who 
cares?

And yes, I ran into a small bump, which was the KSM service complaining 
it can't find the max_kernel_pages file anymore, since the new kernel 
has removed that attribute. So I commented out the relevant line in the 
script, and so much for that.

Since then (36 hours ago) nothing special has happened. So if I won't 
see any Radeon related crashes anymore, I'll mark this one as mission 
completed.

    Eli

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