On 10/31/2009 09:18 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Saturday 31 October 2009 20:09:37 Harry Putnam wrote:
Nikos Chantziaras<rea...@arcor.de> writes:
The link is created only if you have the "symlink" USE flag enabled.
Also, "Gentoo requires that the [...] symbolic link points to the
sources of the kernel you are running" is not entirely correct. It is
required only when you want to build something against that
kernel.
. . . . Obviously, you need to create the symlink if you want to build
the newly installed kernel, even though the system is still running an
older one.
Why is that obvious? That's what seemed confusing to me.
Nothing about creating it with USE=symlin, eselect, or by hand is a
problem. Or hard to follow, and I've always just done it by hand.
Nikos is being kind to the document writers :-)
In fact, the documentation is flat out wrong - there is no requirement for the
symlink to point to the currently running kernel. It must point to the kernel
sources you want to *configure* or use for an emerge that installs a kernel
driver.
For instance, you might be running 2.6.31-r4 and also have 2.6.31-r3
installed. To install nvidia-drivers, you must build it *twice* - against each
kernel you want to use it with (nvidia-drivers builds and installs a kernel
driver into /lib/modules/<kernel version>)
It's a bit more obfuscated than that. Maybe nvidia-drivers work
different, but ati-drivers will build against /usr/src/linux but install
the actual modules in /lib/modules/running_kernel. If /usr/src/linux
doesn't point to the running kernel, the modules will be installed in
the wrong place.
