At 11:31 PM -0700 2000/7/10, Kris Kennaway wrote:

I'm slightly confused by which method is appropriate when.

Are you saying that if you've updated your sources via cvsup (or any other method), you should always use the new procedure, and otherwise use the old one? If so, can we get this incorporated into the short bullet-point list of steps required for "Staying Stable with FreeBSD"? In fact, it would appear to me that we are now starting to diverge rather significantly from section 18.4 of the Handbook.

As I understand it, the procedure should now be:

1. If you have updated your sources, the process of building a kernel may depend on which version of certain tools may be installed. Therefore, the only safe way to build a kernel on such a machine is to do the following:

make buildworld make buildkernel make installkernel shutdown (drop into single-user mode) make installworld mergemaster reboot

These steps require that you have defined "KERNEL=WHATEVER" in /etc/make.conf. If you have not, you will need to add "kernel=WHATEVER" to the "make installkernel" command above. This will install the kernel /WHATEVER, and you will need to have "kernel=/WHATEVER" in /etc/bootloader.conf.

2. If you have not updated your sources and just want to rebuild the kernel with the sources you already have, use the standard procedure:

config WHATEVER cd ../../compile/WHATEVER make depend make make install

However, if you have problems, you should try re-running this process with "config -r WHATEVER" to clean out the remnants of the old build tree and to clean out any potential cruft. Do not report problems to the mailing lists with kernels you have built, if you have not configured them with "config -r".

Note that the steps given in #1 above will install a copy of the GENERIC kernel. If you have a customized kernel, you'll need to follow those instructions to install the GENERIC kernel, and then follow the steps in #2 above to install your customized kernel.

Also note that if you run into problems anywhere along any part of either of these processes, ensure that you are not passing the "-j4" (or any other "-j#" argument) to make. If you are, then start over from the beginning, this time omitting the "-j4" argument to cause a parallel make. While using "-j4" usually works, there are sometimes problems with it. Do not report any problems to the mailing lists with a "make world", "make buildworld", or a kernel build that was done with a "-j4" argument passed to make.

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