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Upgrading Your Current System To Kernel 2.6
An anonymous reader writes "This white paper provides an overview of the process of moving an existing desktop system to the 2.6 kernel. It will highlight other software requirements imposed by the new kernel and administrative changes that you must make when migrating an existing system to the 2.6 kernel. It supplements previous whitepapers in the same series about Customizing the 2.6 kernel [Slashdot discussion here(1)] and porting drivers to the 2.6 kernel [Slashdot discussion here(2)] to the 2.6 kernel."
on Windows update?!? Where the heck is it?
I had all kinds of trouble upgrading to 2.6. Sound and networking didn't work, as well as some of my filesystems. Luckily, I'm smart enough to setup lilo to run multiple kernels, so going back to 2.4 was no trouble to tweak my config file and recompile and try again. I never got everything totally working right. I was going to just wait until the next series of distro releases solved these problems for me, but maybe I should give it another shot.
I'd like to see a nice up to date list distributions that are built around the 2.6 kernel. Trying to update a Mandrake system to 2.6 didn't work for me and these days I don't have the time to track down errors.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Although it is obvious to many slashdot readers, the summary doesn't even mention the word "Linux".
So maybe we should point out that this is a whitepaper on upgrading Linux systems to kernel 2.6. (And no, I don't think the icon is enough - not everyone has a stuffed Tux on their desk).
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
The painful process of upgrading LVM1 to LVM2. Little documentation on the process, and installing Fedora Core 2 test 1 over an existing Fedora Core 1 gives all sorts of fun. Much hand-holding of your system and other hand-waving is required.
BSD^H^H^H2.4 kernel is dying.
Does anyone else have the same observation?
Speak truth to power.
With the preemptive kernel option enabled and the kernel module autoloader in 2.6 it does all you would ever need:
Loads any modules you need
Lets you do tasks preemtpively
Boots in a much shorter time (from 2.4.23's 35 sec to ~14 sec in my case)
It's also rock solid in my experience now, a good sound kernel choice that will fit virtually all workstations =)
Matroxfb ain't working. I'm not going to switch until they fix it.
The biggest issue I'm facing with 2.6 is getting module loading to work correctly. Seems that Debian/Knoppix isn't reading through the correct config file at bootup, even with the correct version of module-init-tools running. SpeedStep seems a bit sketchy too, but it's Centrino, so it could just be a matter of time.
Has anyone else had this problem? I've read that it may be a symptom of running a mixed stable/testing system, but I have yet to see a solution for the problem.
...laptop touchpad don't bother going near 2.6 if you don't know exactly what you're doing. I still haven't got the mouse working. I can't even find anyone who can tell me how to confirm if the touchpad is a synaptic.
I'm not the only one suffering this.
Works great on my slackware desktop.
If there are, I didn't see them. All I did was:
apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.2-1-686
update-grub
Two lines on the command line and a reboot and I've been happy ever since.
Oh, wait, we're talking outside Debian. Nevermind.
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel about a month ago, and have been nothing but impressed. I got increased speed, my sound works great (ALSA) and with 1280x1024 Framebuffer and Bootsplash (85Hz refresh no-less) even my console is nice to look at.
My NVidia drivers worked flawlessly with the new kernel, as well as my wireless network.
I get oooh's and ahhh's from the co-workers with 3DDesk, and my boss is impressed with my setup, even though he's got a shiny new G5 under his desk.
That's just my experience, though... YMMV
I'm on a chair.
The purpose of Linus et al is not to beat Microsoft. That's statedly incidental. The ultimate purpose is to make a free (as in both) OS which 'just works'.
To that end, sometimes things will have to be broken to improve. The alternative is to support legacy code till the end of days and end up with MS-like bloatware.
Jo(e) average user doesn't want, need, or expect to upgrade their running kernel. So who cares how hard it is?
Justin.
Built my 2.6 kernel, won't run (kpanic), don't care, waiting for Red Hat or whoever to do it for me.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
The term "white paper" is meaningless these days. Now that the marketing departments have gotten ahold of it, "white papers" are usually nothing more than the same information included in the colored brochures, only on a white piece of paper in black text.
The days of "white paper" meaning a strictly technical or educational document are gone. These days, "white papers" are just another form of advertising.
One thing that was a blocker for me to move to 2.6 was my mouse would go a lot faster while in X. I finally found that it was the new input system. Under 2.4 the default XF86Config file would have two mouse input settings, one for ps/2 and one for USB. Under 2.6 both of these were picked up regardless of the mouse being ps/2 or usb so all mouse events, clicks, etc were picked up twice. Removing one of the mouse entries made everything work as normal.
Probably everyone but me knew this, but thought I'd throw it out in case anyone else is in the same boat.
Here's my experience with 2.6 kernel (been running it since 2.6.0 was released).
DVDs look awesome. I had to tweak the hdparms for DMA, but they work great.
Ever since NVidia came out with the latest drivers, things like the UT2k4 Demo fun fantastic.
I was a little hung up on modules... seeing as I rarely use them, it wasn't a show-stopper. The conversion from modutils to module-init-tools was mostly painless.
Recently, I've been playing with MTD, and trying to get a test machine to use 12 out of the 16 megs of an AGP Voodoo3 3000 card's memory as a device I can format or use as swap. I have been unsuccessful. (2.6.3). This is also on a testing machine, not my "main" machine.
On a slightly OT note, planning on building a Mini ITX system with a Via Epia board (one of the 800 mhz ones). Should have the case this week, jury's still out on the mb.
Other than that, no complaints, it's been fantastic. I'm running 2.6.3 on 3 different machines (with different responsibilies) and it feels like there's no going back now!
FLR
Circa 1985...
Stories like this do nothing to help build a convincing argument to Stove users that Microwaves are in fact the better oven. If even seasoned Microwave users have problems popping popcorn, think of how frustrating it would be for someone less technically-inclined.
This is one of many issues that Microwave users have to work out before it can become a true mainstream oven.
Circa 2000...
Does anybody still use a stove to pop popcorn? Just asking.
Anyone else had this problem when upgrading to 2.6? I previously tried upgrading my Mandrake 9.2 install to 2.6 and failed (on boot, no init found, no matter what I tried).
.config file, the system would not boot. For some reason it can't mount the root filesystem even though I have both ext2 and reiserfs support compiled into the kernel. Anyone else experience this? My only guess at this point is that I'm missing some sort of customization that Mandrake did to their version of the kernel.
So I tried Mandrake 10 RC1 (which uses 2.6.2 by default). It booted and runs wonderfully. However, yesterday I tried to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.3 from kernel.org. Using "make oldconfig" (and following the rest of the compiliation procedures) on my Mandrake-supplied
Note: Abit IC7-G motherobard (not sure if that makes a difference).
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I run gentoo on a dual pIII-600 with an ATI radeon7000 / SBlive / intelpro100. Kernels 2.4.18 through 2.4.22 took several hours of tweaking before I could even get the thing to boot correctly. ( 2.2 never had this problem )
Last week I took about 30 minutes and grabbed 2.6.3 did a clean/config/make, which took about the majority of that time, and booted into the fastest Linux box I have ever had.
2.6 booted with OpenGL without any tweaks pushing glgears to 1600fps and ALSA kicked in without errors on the emu10k1. Device drivers posed no issues for either the USB keyboard/mouse or hardrive or nework card.
No 'migration' was necessary for either windowmaker / enlightenment / blender / JACK or any of my other 100 some odd apps.
The one problem I can't seem to find the answer to is how Debian tells the kernel which modules to autoload at boot. I know that for 2.4 kernels, there is a list in /etc/modules. However, with my 2.6 kernel. that file is ignored and I have to manually load all the modules I need after boot. A pain in the ass since I try to keep most of my device drivers as modules, like for my NICs, video card, USB, sound card, etc. Has anyone using Debian and 2.6 kernel found a solution to this?
Sometimes I feel like a nut... Ok so it's most of the time
Fedora Core 1 forum posting with people who have already done it. It seems pretty easy from the looks of it. I'm going to do it just as soon as I get some free time...
And for the love of god, please read the whole thread. Don't ever install a kernel with rpm -Uvh. Leave yourself a backup (rpm -ivh).
Get Firefox!
Another possible reason for your mouse speeding up is the 2.6 kernel actually initializing the mouse and setting the precision, etc. You can disable this, and return to "almost 2.4"-like behaviour by adding the following kernel parameter to your boot config:
psmouse_noext=1
Well, it works just fine for me...
Sure it is. It's just picky about who its friends are.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
apt-get update
apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.3-1-686
update-grub
Reboot. Works.
The thing that amazes me is I've had this laptop running over two weeks since the last reboot! OK, so I close the silly thing and let it hibernate, but then I pop it open and I have a three-second startup time! The system uptime on "top" showed 15 days, 20 hours. I've never had this luxury with my laptop when using the 2.4 kernel, ever!
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
Man, I keep seeing debian users posting one-liners like this, and I think to myself yet again, "I have to try Debian out one of these days." Is it really this simple? (I'm by no means a beginner at Linux, I just have to overcome some intertia. I started w/ Slackware back in the day, but now use SuSE. Any quick advice?)
emerge development-sources /usr/src/linux /usr/src/linux-2.6.3 /usr/src/linux /boot /boot/grub/grub.conf
rm
ln -s
mount
genkernel all
vi
reboot
That is ALL there is to it. It is pretty much the same as upgrading to any other kernel. The only trick I saw was that the kernel needs more parameters than 2.4. It needs "root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc real_root=/dev/hda?" appended, which kernel 2.4 did not need. All the other tools (module autoloaders, etc.) are already 2.6 ready on a Gentoo system
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I think the reason for the moderation is that it is both a very old joke and a very unfunny one. It appears almost everytime some release announcement is made on Slashdot.
The process appears to be something like the following:
2 /0 111.html
Install device-mapper patch into 2.4 kernel. Devmapper isn't part of the 2.4, but is part of 2.6. Not sure if any distros include the patch in their 2.4 releases (Red Hat doesn't)
Install LVM2 into existing system (LVM1 and LVM2 commands can co-exist)
Boot 2.4 kernel w/device mapper and LVM2
*hand waving*
http://linux.msede.com/lvm_mlist/archive/2003/1
(AKA http://tinyurl.com/2jj3h)
Install 2.6 kernel w/device mapper and LVM2
In this case, you're only running LVM2 commands and device mapper. You still have to convert the LVM1 metadata on disk to LVM2 *hand waving*
LVM2 uses an 'lvm' command that has the operation you want to perform as an argument. This 'lvm vgcreate' instead of 'vgcreate'. AFAIK, the remainder of the arguments are the same as before.
I've tried all versions of 2.6 (2.6.1,2,3) but still get this problem. Everything seems smoother/more responsive except for a problem I have with a game (enemy territory). In 2.4 this game usually loads a map in 20-30 seconds. In 2.6 it takes about the same time but every map thereafter gets longer and longer, until they start taking several minutes. I did a test by launching my own server and just kept reloading the same map. 1st try 32 seconds, 5th try over 4 minutes. If anything it should be slightly quicker as some would be in memory/swap. The only other game I have in linux similar to enemy territory is quake3. It has the same normal load times in both 2.4 and 2.6, but it's maps are much smaller than enemy territory's so it doesn't stress the system as much. This leads me to believe that it's more a swap/memory issue than a graphics driver issue. I did hdparm tests and dma is enabled and I'm getting about the same speed in 2.4 as in 2.6. My system is a p4 1.6 with 128 megs ram gf4ti 4200. Now, I realize 128 megs is low these days, and would probably help aleviate this problem but it seems when a system is stressed in this way 2.4 performs better than 2.6. In 2.4 I can play on a server for as much as I want but with 2.6 I usually get kicked within a couple of new maps due to it timing out. Reconnecting to the server doesnt help, but quiting ET and restarting helps for that initial map, but then the cycle repeats. I don't see a way on this forum of attaching my config, I compiled the kernel myself and have gone over it several times to see if some option could be the cause of this. The first thing I tried was turning off the preemptive kernel option, but didn't help. My system is debian based (morphix distro) and as I mentioned I compile the kernel myself, not a precompiled kernel. I also made sure X doesn't have a negative nice value. You might suggest to throw more ram at the problem and even though it might help, I shouldn't have to as 2.4 seems to get by.
Install Debian unstable. if it works, good. At that point, call it 'stable' and stop upgrading it.
If you find something doesn't work, update your package cache and download an updated version of that program. If it works, good. At that point, call it "debian stable" and stop upgrading it.
Wash, rinse and repeat.
Not only is it not particularly informative in any sense, it is also basically wrong.
> Loads any modules you need
It doesnt quite work like that- in its default config it basically loads all modules, and doesnt let you unload them- so when you plug something in it has a higher chance of "just working".
This isnt anything special, and GEEWHIZBANG! it actually ends up functioning like a good old monolithic kernel.
> Lets you do tasks preemtpively
Hahah as the AC said - "you can complete tasks before you even knew you wanted to do them"
> Boots in a much shorter time (from 2.4.23's 35 sec to ~14 sec in my case
I don't know about you, but most of my systems booting time is in the init scripts- I saw little difference in actual kernel boot time...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
Oh, and another problem I had was "Error: Unknown pseudo-op: `.incbin'" -- this was fixed by upgrading binutils to the latest version. Aside from these two problems, the upgrade went smoothly.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
My only problem was that my clock has gone nuts.
With 2.4 it was stable, but now under 2.6 some days it stays the same, other days it might move by 15+ minutes in a 24 hour period (I ntp it back of course)
And sound support for the nforce2 mobo is better.
The purpose of Linus et al is not to beat Microsoft. That's statedly incidental. The ultimate purpose is to make a free (as in both) OS which 'just works'.
Here on Slashdot, the purpose is to beat Microsoft.
I must live a charmed life, think pure thoughts or something, because my 2.6 experience has been nothing but positive.
My first experience was with a Compaq laptop, Slackware 9.0 and 2.6.0-test4. I found that I broke the 2.4 modutils when I upgraded to module-init-tools, but since 2.6 worked so well, I really didn't care. Oh, and I've never had any trouble with that crazy mouse touchpad thingy.
Slackware 9.1 says it's 2.6-ready, and it is. I've installed it on a number of systems and upgraded the kernel easily.
My current challenge is my Sun Ultra 5, which currently runs Debian (woody) with the 2.4.18 kernel it came with. I ended up building 64 bit SPARC gcc and friends as cross compilers on an x86 box. But hello world still doesn't link... :-(
...laura
I recently gave the 2.6 kernel a shot (slack 9.1), and the only thing I've noticed so far is that my external modem (serial port) disconnects immediately after making a connection. I wonder if there is some setting I might have missed or if it's a bug in the kernel. Has anyone had a similar experience?
thanks
As an aside, you can save yourself a lot of trouble in doing a fresh install with some intelligent partitioning. Most systems have an expert mode (or may offer nothing but expert mode, depending on the system) that lets you specify which partition corresponds to which mount point manually and decide which partitions should and should not be reformatted. If you set up /home on a separate partition, you can wipe everything else while leaving your user data alone. That can save you the trouble of having to restore all of your personal files when you install the new system. It's not necessarily perfect- some configuration files may change between versions of your favorite desktop environment, for instance- but it's a big improvement. You should obviously back up your data before doing the install just in case, but you should be doing periodic backups of your system already anyway.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
My setup - Debian on a Dell Inspiron 8100.
;)
:) With the addition of KDE 3.2 getting released this has been a really good upgrade and I would definitely recommend anyone else to do the same...
First of all the menuconfig menus are a lot more well organised and there are a lot more options, too. Configured it up and it booted OK... I've upgraded to every version so far. The good things:
* Much less work required with "external" device drivers. With 2.4 I had to separately compile ACPI, ALSA, the nVidia driver, PCMCIA and Lucent modem drivers. Now it's just the Lucent and nVidia drivers as the other three are now included already.
* ACPI support is better. Won't bore you with the details, but it is
* Everything's faster, although I was using the new scheduler stuff as a patch to 2.4 so it didn't make too much difference.
* probably lots of little things I can't think of right now
The bad things - there seem to have been a few nasty bugs, but that's to be expected with such a big upgrade and most of them have been sorted. Currently ACPI battery support is doing funny things and occasionally reporting that the battery's empty, when it's not. Give it a couple of releases though and it should be all good
this author has written several papers about various portions of linux, configuring and setup.
I actually read his stuff, because it tends to make a lot of sense, and he has really good ideas.
I look forward to more articls from this author.
cdrecord works with atapi burners now. (I make this blanket statement based only on the fact that I was able to burn a cd this morning).
The trick is:
cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATAPI
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:1,0,0 isname.iso
no boot time kernel options need to be passed (no more hdb=ide-scsi nonsense).
Good luck.
I am running Debian stable, and let me tell ya, its been nothing but trouble trying to upgrade the kernel.
.config file.
First problem, was getting the new module utilitys installed, I had to setup pinning. Not too hard, but was a pain to find some clear docs on this.
After that, I had many issues with getting iptables working. I can't find the damn thing in menuconfig, maybe I am blind, but I ended up just editing the
iptables still isn't fully working, I can't even connect to the internet using the machine it self. Why ? Becuase, bind9 is bitching about the kernel version. dhcpd isn't working either, due to kernel version.
When I migrated from 2.2 -> 2.4, there wasn't this many issues. I understand that the changes are needed, and things will clean up over time. I just wish there was better docs explaining WHAT has to be done.
Another intresting note, is that insmod doesn't work correctly, however modprobe does. Which, is very odd in it self.
I am too frustered after tooling around with it today, spent 2 hours on it. I will try it again next week.
I really want to upgrade to 2.6, since it better supports the opteron chips and better support (From what I have heard) on SATA / raid cards. (I have a 3ware SATA raid controller)
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Debian IS NOT user friendly. Or maybe it is if you have only debian systems and if you are ready to lose your stability if you don't follow the Debian Way to configure something, I don't know.
Guys, a system is user-friendly if it help you. Debian really don't help me. A system that install itself without problem and *just work* is friendly.
I've been using 2.6 since .0 with absolutely no problems (execpt for monkeying with nvidia binary driver patches for a while there).
.2 and .3 too), but it doesn't really seem to have much momentum for getting included.
:)
The only complaint I can come up with (which isn't actually a complaint at all) is that 2.6 is still lacking kexec() support. Randy Dunlap has been doing some work on it including patches for 2.6.1 (works with
I've only rebooted my workstation 3 times since 2.6.2 came out, and 2 of those was a 'kexec -e' reboot. So I haven't had to wait on my annoying Video BIOS, Motherboard BIOS, or Adaptec BIOS in almost a month, which is nice.
Still, I can see why it is not included because it does break non-standard consoles (e.g. fbcon) on kexec reboot. Sure this is offtopic, but everyone else seems to be bitching about their beefs with 2.6 so I thought I would too
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
I upgraded to 2.6 a while ago, just because I wanted all of the neat goodies it brings with it (QoS, Bluetooth, etc.). My server has no compiler, and I have no "backup" system, so I compile things on various other Linux systems I run.
/dev/null
It basically runs Gentoo, in that I copied the boot CD, stripped out anything I didn't need, and manually installed things like ssh, apache, etc. The upside is that it's small. The downside is that it's a pain in the butt to upgrade.
The 2.6 install worked without too many initial problems, except the whole devfsd being required, and me not getting around to removing the requirement. That is, until I tried to reboot:
server root # shutdown -r now
Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Wed Feb 25 11:24:11 2004):
The system is going down for reboot NOW!
RK_Init: idt=0xc05dc000, FUCK: Can't find sys_call_table[]
server root #
At this point, I'm blaiming the redhat compiler for stripping out something it shouldn't have. Though, anyone else have any suggestions?
char sig[120] = "\0"
Not to mention that "White Paper", "White Hats", "Black Hats" and "Red Hat" is all very racist these days...
Was it worth it. If you're keen, probably - boot times are reduced and the system seems more responsive when under load. But for the most part - if you already have fast hardware - you might not notice the difference. A safe approach might be to wait for distro's to catch up - I have no idea how easy it's going to be to upgrade my RH 9 system to RH-Fedora now that I've changed all these things.
Here's the major things I had to do after the upgrade...
I had to stop using ide-scsi for my burner - 2.6.3 can lock up totally if I use ide-scsi. According to the ide-cd maintainer ide-scsi is on the way out. The cdrecord (v2) in RH 9 is capable of using ATAPI devices - see the man page. If you're using k3b, just point it a
I have es1371 on board sound. I found ALSA sound was worse than OSS - annoying clicks at the ends of sounds when transitioning to silence - might be able to fixed with tweaking pci priorities. I found it easy to stick with OSS - if fact, originally after first upgrading, OSS kept working without me doing anything (just make sure enable the OSS kernel build options as well as the ALSA ones).
Rpm has some kind of issue - threading? Using the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable fixes it. I use the following script to run it:For example:It's also been reported that upgrading to the latest rpm will fix it. You can also use my script to run anything that doesn't like the new threading model - for example, older versions of xine.
Getting 3D under X11 to work was a pain. In an effort to get it to work I downloaded and built the latest X11 driver. But I'm not sure this is necessary because I later found my major hurdle was that the AGP module had been split and I now need to load four modules to get it to work:Obviously which agp related modules to load now varies depending on your hardware. In my case this is a AMD processor, VIA mainboard, and an ATI 9200 graphics card. Here is my modprobe.conf entry:I suspect this is all I really needed to do to get 3D running.
I had to upgrade to lm_sensors-2.8.4 to get temperature and RPM monitoring to function - and I had to reconfigure the settings to get good fan RPM readings. Ksensors needed a rebuild.
Uhh, I think there are actually about three or four hundred lines in between "make menuconfig" and "make bzImage".
You also have to manually upgrade all the packages to 2.6-supporting versions (by reading the README to find out what they are), and download and install the kernel source. Even if you wish to configure and compile the kernel yourself, Debian's package system will do this for you.
But the real issues involved in upgrading a kernel have nothing to do with how to install it. That is easy. LVM has been deprecated by a new version, devfs has been deprecated, ide-scsi has been deprecated, etc.: there are real issues to resolve that require changes -outside- the kernel and knowledge of the underlying issues.