2.2.1x Kernel Building Problems

rips asks: "I've been a moderately skilled Linux user for several years now but my problem solving skills on this one have got me stumped. I have compiled many kernels before but when compiling a recent kernel (2.2.11 or 2.2.12) the compilation will run without a hitch, lilo (v20) will accept the changes but after a reboot the system will crash at: 'Uncompressing Linux... Ok'. I have tried compiling the 2.2.12 kernel on 3 different machines with 2 different distributions (RedHat 6.0 and Slackware 3.2.0) and for different target processors and kernel options but nothing seems to work. I've even tried running off a boot disk incase it was LILO but to no avail. This has really got me stumped. Has anyone else figured out the cause/solution to this?"

Comments

make what?

[davie]

Your boot image may be too large. This is why we now have the option to build a (smaller) bzip-compressed image, instead of a gzip-compressed image. At the end of the final make stage (make boot, make Zimage, etc.) the last few lines of output should tell you the size of the image, e.g.:

Root device is (3, 1)
Boot sector 512 bytes.
Setup is 3436 bytes.
System is 515 kB

I believe the max is 1024kB, give or take a few, since the image has to fit in one MB (correct me if I'm wrong). At any rate, if your image is close to 1024kB, try either making a bzip-compressed image, with "make bZimage," or make more of your drivers modular.

If that doesn't fix the problem, post your "make the kernel" command and the last few lines of output.