How to build my own Linux tarball?

How to build my own Linux tarball?

[Michael David Crawford]

I'm trying to build my own version of the Linux Dom0 kernel.  I started 
with the linux-2.6.18-xen-3.3.0 tarball, then made some edits, then 
rolled up my sources into a .tar.bz2.

According to the Wiki I should be able to build using *my* version of 
the sources with the following commands:

$ export XEN_LINUX_SOURCE=tarball
$ make world

but no matter what I try, I can't get it to build my source.  Sometimes 
it wants to download the kernel.org tarball, and sometimes the build 
just fails, depending on what I try.

I have Googled from horizon to horizon, but have not found any insight.

If the above commands are expected to work, where exactly should my 
tarball be placed in relation to the xen-3.3.1 directory?

Does my Linux tarball have to have a particular name?

Thanks!

Mike
-- 
Michael David Crawford
mdc@prgmr.com

    prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid.

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Re: How to build my own Linux tarball?

[Simon Horman]

On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 08:13:59AM -0700, Michael David Crawford wrote:
> I'm trying to build my own version of the Linux Dom0 kernel.  I started  
> with the linux-2.6.18-xen-3.3.0 tarball, then made some edits, then  
> rolled up my sources into a .tar.bz2.
>
> According to the Wiki I should be able to build using *my* version of  
> the sources with the following commands:
>
> $ export XEN_LINUX_SOURCE=tarball
> $ make world
>
> but no matter what I try, I can't get it to build my source.  Sometimes  
> it wants to download the kernel.org tarball, and sometimes the build  
> just fails, depending on what I try.
>
> I have Googled from horizon to horizon, but have not found any insight.
>
> If the above commands are expected to work, where exactly should my  
> tarball be placed in relation to the xen-3.3.1 directory?
>
> Does my Linux tarball have to have a particular name?

Hi Mike,

looking at the code, it seems to me that the tarball target
is not designed to handle the case where the tarball already
exists locally. As a work-around, could unpack the kernel manually.
Note that this won't work if you run make world, as it runs
make kclean, which cleans the kernel directory before building:

# cd xen-3.3.1
# make clean kdelete
# tar -zxf ../../xen-3.3.0/linux-2.6.18-xen-3.3.0.tar.gz
# mv linux-2.6.18-xen-3.3.0 linux-2.6.18
# touch linux-2.6.18/.valid-src
# make XEN_LINUX_SOURCE=tarball dist

Or you could build the kernel(s) separately,
possibly outside of the xen-3.3.1 tree.