Hello Dirk, Thanks for taking the time to reply. The combination of gentoo-sources and genkernel has been working quite well for the 2 yrs I've been running Gentoo. It's convenient to have grub.conf auto-magically updated and that's not been an issue.
When upgrading from one kernel revision to another, oldconfig is nice because it makes the new kernel options obvious. Using menuconfig hides that information. Of course, as you point out, diff can be used after either tool to see exactly what has been changed. The messages I mentioned, i.e. "Loading modules" and "Activating mdev" appear during the boot process before /etc/init.d scripts are run (and, yes, it's "mdev", not "udev"). However, I don't know which program is running and printing these messages. 'Tis good to hear that 2.6.27.4 is working for you. However my hardware (AMD64x2, IDE drive, etc) and kernel options are, I wager, different than yours and _something_ in 2.6.27 is unhappy. The question of the day is "What?". Regards, David On Tue, 4 Nov 2008 22:27:40 +0100 Dirk Heinrichs wrote: > Am Dienstag, 4. November 2008 20:51:10 schrieb David Relson: > > > Due to problems experienced with 2.6.25-gentoo-r7, I've built > > 2.6.27-gentoo-r2. I started with the 2.6.25-r7 .config file, ran > > "make oldconfig", then "genkernel all". > > Don't know if that helps, but anyway, here's what I usually do: > > I only use kernel.org kernels (vanilla-sources in Gentoo). They're > the same no matter the distro. > > I have a copy of my kernel config (in /etc/kernel/config). If you > configured your kernel appropriately, you can also find the config of > the running kernel in /proc/config(.gz). Upon a major kernel upgrade, > I run make menuconfig, load my old config file and check all the > important options, eventually switching on/off new options which I > find useful. > > I never ever ran make oldconfig. I also never ran genkernel. Why > should I? After leaving menuconfig it's just make, make > modules_install, make install (or copy the appropriate kernel file > to /boot manually). > > Then I run a self-written script which updates some symlinks in /boot > (so that I don't need to edit grub.conf) and cleans /lib/modules, > leaving only the currently running kernel and the new one arround, > together with their modules. > > I didn't have a kernel related boot problem since a very long time > now. But even if I had, I still have the old one. > > > The new 2.6.27 kernel appears > > to load modules OK, then hangs. The old 2.6.25-r7 kernel displays > > "Activating mdev" after it finishes loading modules. > > Don't know what mdev is (or is this a typo: udev), so I can't help > with this. > > > Any suggestions of what to check for or change? > > Try to diff both kernel configs. Look wether there's something > missing in the new one that was there in the old. Maybe try again > with the method described above. > > BTW: I'm running 2.6.27.4 w/o any problem. > > Bye... > > Dirk
