building kernels

[Alan's Home for Wayward Notes File.]

In article <1990Dec7.182515.18156 at uwslh.slh.wisc.edu>, jiml at uwslh.slh.wisc.edu (James E. Leinweber) writes:
> flanagan at lisbon.stat.washington.edu (Jim Flanagan) writes:
> 
> >>>Third question: Rebuilding the kernel by hand was FUN! Why did DEC take
> >>>this away from us? (If you try to do it by hand under 4.0, it rarely works)

	I suspect there was large percentage of our customers that
	found it arcane rather than fun.
> 
> >  Well, unless I use the "doconfig" when making the kernel (which has been
> >  known to give unpredictable results, like removing important device drivers
> >  entries, &c.) I get a whole lot of undefined symbol errors...

	I think it depends on what options (if any) you run doconfig
	with.  Left to itself (no options) do config looks at the
	currently running kernel and /vmunix to determine what is
	on the system and rebuilds you configuration for you.  This
	is useful during the installation, but not as useful when
	you want to add a driver for something that isn't on the
	system yet.  In such cases the option I have found most
	useful is -c.  It actually pays attention to the configuration
	file you point it at.  More recent version appear to do the
	make clean first and it V4.0 it asks if you want to edit the
	configuration file before it starts.

-- 
Alan Rollow				alan at nabeth.enet.dec.com