On Sat, 2010-09-11 at 10:24 +0200, Stéphane Guedon wrote: > few months ago, I read linux kernel in a nutschell(sic), and the author wrote > we > shouldn't do kernel operations (config and build) as root.
I call bullsh*t. I've been compiling kernels for 17 years and for the most part have done it as root without any problems. What the author is saying is that, to an extent, in theory no one should compile anything as root, or really do anything non-system-adminly as root. You should only do as root what is critically necessary (e.g. make install) as root. In a perfect, tidy world we'd all do that. This world, however does not exist. Even portage, by default does configure and make as root (albeit in a sandbox so it is safe(r). What the author means is theoretically the config/compile phase could unintentionally cause some kind of harm to your system. In practice I have never seen this or heard of it. The kernel devs are bright enough to ensure that the compilation does nothing outside the source tree itself. It's a good guideline but, like the government's dietary guidelines, not ones I intend to follow religiously. > Is sudo (or kdesudo ?) a good replacement to that ? sudo runs things as root, so effectively you've done nothing but add a password prompt to the mix. Gentoo actually makes this a bit more difficult, because usually one uses portage to install the kernel sources, and they get installed as root-owned, and only root has write access to the kernel tree. Some people, such as myself, use kernel sources outside of portage (I follow a git repo) and do so as a non-root user. In this case the kernel tree is not owned by root and the config/compile is easily done as a non-root user. If you are super-paranoid. You can make a non-root copy of /usr/src/linux and compile it as a non-root user. But there really isn't any point in using sudo. It's effectively doing the same thing that you are trying to avoid.
