Re: building 2.6.35
> If you've looked at my kernel building web page,
> http://www.wowway.com/~zlinuxman/Kernel.htm, you will see that I
> don't cover this. That's because I don't use it when I build my
> own custom kernels. I do use it when building a "regular"
> Debian package, but for some reason I've never bothered with it for
> creating my own custom kernels. I just log in as root and forget
> about it. For some people, this seems to be a "religious" issue.
> But I never bother with it. I just login as root and forget about it.
> So many of the steps require root authority (real root authority)
> that it's simpler for me just to stay root the whole time.
> If I ever get burned by it, I'll probably change my lazy ways.
> But I've never had a problem with it.
>
> To each his own. Live and let live. Etc.
A less religious explanation, from Greg Kroah-Hartman, author of The
Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, and well-known kernel hacker.
"This warning is the most important thing to remember while working through the
steps in this book. Everything in this book—downloading the kernel source code,
uncompressing it, configuring the kernel, and building it—should be done as a
normal user on the machine. Only the two or three commands it takes to install a
new kernel should be done as the superuser (root).
There have been bugs in the kernel build process in the past, causing
some special
files in the /dev directory to be deleted if the user had superuser
permissions while
building the Linux kernel.* There are also issues that can easily
arise when uncompressing
the Linux kernel with superuser rights, as some of the files in the kernel
source package will not end up with the proper permissions and will cause build
errors later.
* This took quite a while to fix, as none of the primary kernel
developers build kernels as root, so
they did not suffer from the bug. A number of weeks went by before it
was finally determined that
the act of building the kernel was the problem. A number of kernel
developers half-jokingly suggested
that the bug remain in, to help prevent anyone from building the
kernel as root, but calmer
heads prevailed and the bug in the build system was fixed." - Linux
Kernel in a Nutshell, p. 4
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