Re: how to build a kernel package of flavor 'armmp'

[Ian Campbell <ijc@debian.org>]

On Mon, 2016-12-19 at 09:09 +0000, Simon H wrote:
> However, when using
> 'dpkg -i linux-image-4.8.7_4.8.7-1_armhf.deb'
> to install the kernel, the device complains:
> 
> "Kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.8.7 does not match any of the expected
> flavors
> (armmp), therefore not writing it to flash"

Historically there were several kernel flavours on armhf which would
only boot on their particular hardware flavour and often a tricky
recovery procedure (i.e. involve special cables not everyone has etc)
if you load a bad kernel, so flash-kernel is quite careful/fussy and
checks the flavour which is part of the "uname" string (i.e. "4.8.7" in
your case or "3.16.0-4-armmp" for an official kernel image). It's of
less utility on armmp now that we have consolidated to the single armmp
flavour, we do still have the -lpae subflavour which needs to be
avoided on non-capable hardware so the checks aren't completely useless
on armhf stil.

I'm not sure if there is a way to say "don't worry about the suffix" it
might be sufficient to edit /etc/flash-kernel/db to add an override
stanza for your machine:
    Machine: <contents of your /proc/device-tree/model>
    Kernel-Flavors:
i.e. an empty "Kernel-Flavours", or maybe 
    Machine: <contents of your /proc/device-tree/model>
    Kernel-Flavors: ""
i.e. with an explicitly empty string.

If neither of those works then the easiest solution IMHO (and what I've
always done IIRC, it's been a while since I needed to though) is to set
    CONFIG_LOCALVERSION="-armmp"
in your kernel .config or, equivalently, to write the "-armmp" string
(without the quotes this time) to a file called "localversion" at the
root of your kernel source tree. Rebuilding after such a change
should(*) only rebuild a handful of files so it should be reasonably
quick.

HTH,
Ian.

> p.s. I did do a kernel compile on the device; after 4 days it
> completed, but i had not packaged it.  So I ran make deb-pkg, and it
> cleaned my build - bahh!!!

(*) Given this p.s. I'm not so sure of that anymore though :-/