This site is best viewed in Firefox.

make-kpkg and dirty modules

Monday, 17 July 2006

Dammit, tonight I spent too many hours chasing down a "feature" in the Debian kernel build process or the Linux-2.6 kernel. I haven't yet deciced whom to blame. ;-)

Here goes: when you build the latest Linux 2.6 kernel, checked out from the git repository, with make-kpkg you should make sure to uncheck the CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO option in the kernel config before hand. It's under "General setup" --> "Automatically append version information ...". If you don't then your utsrelease.h will contain some annoying extra git version string and your modules directory will look something like this: /lib/modules/2.6.18-dirty. All this due to the LOCALVERSION config, your git checkout and the tiny little fact that make-kpkg modifies (moves away) the two files scripts/packages/{builddeb,Makefile} which leads to the modification of the checkout and the scripts/setlocalversion will tell this to the top Makefile which in turn will create this whole mess.

Take my advice, untick the CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO option. It's the easiest one to get away with.

Posted by Joachim Nilsson at 22:10 in /debian | Permalink

Quick note

Monday, 17 July 2006

About that /etc/network/interface autoconfig thingy: it's almost done. Works perfect ... at work (connected) and at home (wireless). I need to fine tune the tests, I think, to get the connected stuff to work at home too. The problem seems to be that the test to see if the machine is connected at home is that the MAC it looks for to ID the office network also is available from home, via the VPN. I'll get back on the subject as soon as I've done some more tests.

Posted by Joachim Nilsson at 21:10 in /debian | Permalink