RHEL-Update Kernel

[newbie56]

I have been tasked to upgrade to the newest linux kernel(2.6.30-rc5), which I got from The Linux Kernel Archives. I have downloaded the patch to the root desktop. How do I install the new kernel?

[Rubberman]

You can get O'Reilly's Linux Kernel in a Nutshell book as a set of PDFs free from the internet. It covers building a kernel pretty well and a lot of the other stuff you need to consider while working on this project. In my opinion, this is not a simple task as RHEL 5.3 is has only just released 2.6.18-128.1.10 as of the past few days. I just installed it on my system today. 2.6.30 is a fairly significant update and should probably be installed in an up-to-date Fedora Core system first. With RHEL, you might just find that a lot of things no longer work and that you need to install a lot of updated libraries and packages from source to get the system to function reliably. As I said, not necessarily a simple task.

So, you have never built a kernel from scratch before. Do your research and know what you have to do first. This is not something that can be covered in a forum like this from scratch. You need to be at least partially there before we can really help you. Just my opinion, but I think it is well-considered.

[newbie56]

I found a site Linux Headquarters: Applying a Kernel Patch which guided me to how to install the patch-2.6.30-rc5 and I moved the patch to the usr/src/linux directory. I ran the command

patch -pl < patch-2.6.30-rc5

I get a

patch: **** strip count l is not a number

What does this error mean?

[Rubberman]

Someone probably put a lowercase EL (l) in a script or makefile instead of the number 1. Gee, isn't falling over the bleeding edge fun?!

[newbie56]

What's the highest kernel you have running? Maybe you could attach that and I can test it? Just a thought.