Hello Patrick,

I can give you some hints. First of all, there's a whole chapter or
appendix in lfs about kernel configuration options.

If it is the first time you configure and compile a kernel, build one with
the configuration as provided by kernel.org and keep a backup of that
somewhere on your harddrive and also a live/boot cd.

This in case you might get a kernel panic at boot time and your system
halts before you get acces to a user shell.

In the kernel configuration menu you get many options, sorted in
categories. You can select different options and many times you can choose
for either 'm' or '*', where the '*' stands for put this feature in the
kernel image and the m stands for loadable module. Loadable modules are
loadable and unloadable during runtime while when embedded in the kernel
image they are fixed to the kernel and always loaded when the system boots.
Similar to static or dynamic linking of shared objects, the files in
/usr/lib.

Also, in the kernel configuration menu there is a help available for every
single configuration option available. This gives a short description about
the feature and also enough hints to find more about it online. Also what
the default setting is and a recommended one if you are unsure.

The default kernel configuration is a good stable functioning configuration
that runs on most computers. If you want to improve some system performance
and you do want to update the configuration, I recommend to try the
category devices first and uncheck devices that are not installed in your
computers hardware.

Also certain linux programs sometimes require specific kernel options. Like
udev and udevfs can't go without one and other. Take good care in these
sort of combinations because in this case, if one is missing your system
will hang during boot. Also when you are trying to get an optimal video
card configuration and make mistakes with things like framebuffer support
you might get into a non booting system or black screen.

When you exit the kernel menuconfig menu, your configuration is saved in
.config in the root of your kernel source. You can see this file with ls -a
because files with names that are prefixed with a dot are hidden files.

I would recommend to backup this file for every new kernel you build,
suffixed with a unique version number. If you do so, and you might end up
with a bad configuration you can go back to a previous configuration by
overwriting .config with an older version and you can also find what you
changed since the last build using diff .config .config1.01.

These are the most important things to keep in mind when you are
experimenting with different kernel configurations and will probably
prevent you from getting stuck.

Good luck.
Op 17 aug. 2014 15:19 schreef "Patrick Kennedy" <[email protected]> het
volgende:

> I'm at nearing the end of the LFS book, and I hope to get my new LFS
> system up very soon.  I have a couple good sources to review on compiling
> the kernel, but I just want to check-in and see if I got the basic idea
> right.
>
> It's noted that "make defconfig" might be a good idea.  So, apparently,
> that would be done right before this command -
>
> make LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 LC_ALL= menuconfig
>
> Next, after doing "make defconfig", I would do
>
> make menuconfig
>
> That the hard part, but I have good sources to review for that.  After
> that, I preceded with
>
> make LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 LC_ALL= menuconfig
>
> and keep going to the end, right?
>
> Thanks for any quick pointers, that might keep me on track, but I think
> it's going to work out.  :-)
>
> ~Patrick
>
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