Re: kernel hcking

[Antonio Vargas <wind@cocodriloo.com>]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 04:24:37PM +0100, John Bradford wrote:
> > I'm a kernel newbie and just wanted to know what do most kernel hackers do
> > when working on the kernel say 2.5 when you make changes do u need to
> > recompile the kernel and reboot the machine to test your small modification
> > or do people use something like bochs.
> 
> A lot of developers have multiple physical machines, which makes
> testing various different kernels a lot easier.
> 
> > Also every time you makes changes in the kernel it must be hell to
> > recompile the whole thing
> 
> If you are testing kernels on a separate machine to the one you are
> compiling on, and therefore not rebooting, it's not much of a problem
> - with enough RAM, most or all of the kernel source will be cached,
> and you can compile a kernel in three to five minutes on a fast
> machine.

John, you mean a "make clean && make bzImage" takes you only about 4
minutes??? I would like to know more details about .config, machine
specs, compiler and so on :)

And no doubt having enough RAM to cache all the tree is really good :)

Greets, Antonio.