Hello there. I have just finished installing the vanilla 2.6.36-rc6 kernel in my Gentoo installation in a chroot, I tried to boot the standard Gentoo kernel and I got an error after the “Starting Mdev” line that said that the kernel could not find the root block device, but the file-system drivers for ext4 were not compiled, but this time I built all the file-system drivers into the kernel instead of compiling them as modules which I always do when I build a vanilla kernel. I am running the 2.6.39-rc6 kernel on my Ubuntu 11.04 system and it seems to make the desktop much more responsive and smoother, especially when using Firefox.
This is a directory listing of the /boot folder in the Gentoo installation on /dev/sdb1. You can see the compiled kernel image and the initrd for the 2.6.39 kernel in the /boot folder. Compiling a kernel with genkernel all is very easy and fast as well only taking a few minutes to build the kernel kernel-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.39-rc6 and the initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.39-rc6 image to bootstrap the kernel. I will update with more once I get the Gentoo system up and running.
(chroot) Morgoth linux # ls -hula -R /boot/ /boot/: total 16M drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K May 9 23:00 . drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 4.0K May 10 2011 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1 May 9 21:31 boot -> . drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K May 9 21:32 grub -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.4M May 7 18:12 initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.37-gentoo-r4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.5M May 9 22:48 initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.39-rc6 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 7 17:35 .keep -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.9M May 7 18:01 kernel-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.37-gentoo-r4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.9M May 9 22:34 kernel-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.39-rc6 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.7M May 7 18:01 System.map-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.37-gentoo-r4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.8M May 9 22:34 System.map-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.39-rc6 |
/boot/grub: total 372K drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K May 9 21:32 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K May 9 23:00 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 197 May 8 17:12 default -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 60 May 8 17:12 device.map -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.6K May 8 17:12 e2fs_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.8K May 8 17:12 fat_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.1K May 8 17:12 ffs_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 627 May 9 21:32 grub.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.1K May 8 17:12 iso9660_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.5K May 8 17:12 jfs_stage1_5 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 May 9 21:32 menu.lst -> grub.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.3K May 8 17:12 minix_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.6K May 8 17:12 reiserfs_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34K May 8 17:12 splash.xpm.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 May 8 17:12 stage1 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 106K May 8 17:12 stage2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 106K May 8 17:12 stage2_eltorito -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.3K May 8 17:12 ufs2_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.7K May 8 17:12 vstafs_stage1_5 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.4K May 8 17:12 xfs_stage1_5 (chroot) Morgoth linux # |