I'm building 2.6.12 kernels for my own machine. Two things are rather
problematical:
The content of .config looks like a Makefile snippet. If it is one, can
I add to it the values I want for CC & CFLAGS so they are tied to a
particular build configuration when I need to re-do it?
AFAIK you cannot. It might be enough to select the right processor.
and
The "official" kernel images are all built with initrd. My build
complains about the size (number of blocks) in the initrd fs. Where is
the parameter to create a smaller number of larger "disks" in the initrd fs.
Aw, heck! I might as well add the third -- Why my non-initrd kernel
won't boot?
It panics with Cannot open root device on (3,01), please specify a
correct root.
My lilo.conf indeed says root=/dev/hda1 which is correct.
You need to have the hardisk driver and the filesystem driver in the kernel,
and not as a module if you want to boot with without using initrd.