Kernel compiling now in woofQ2

We still have a problem with Easy Excalibur sometimes hanging at bootup. On my Lenovo Ideacentre desktop PC, it did that twice yesterday, necessitating hard-poweroff, then reboot and it came good. This morning, powered-on and no problem.

Of course, need to track down the cause, and one thing I want to do is investigate if an older kernel will fix it. I did previously think the problem was due to the 6.12.x kernel, and rolled back to 6.6.x, which was fine for several boots, but the hang then struck again.

Anyway, do want to take another look at the 6.6.x kernel, and this is an opportunity to overhaul kernel compiling. The method used so far, that has been in place for 20+ years, is badly in need of an overhaul. These old source, patches and build scripts, are online here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/source/kernel/

However, that is now superseded by a new build system, builtin to woofQ2. I wrote the scripts last night and compiled the 6.6.102 kernel. This latest woofQ2 is a tarball, available online here, though I haven't yet uploaded the latest:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/woofq2/woofq2-project/

When the woofq2-<date>.tar.gz is expanded, there is a new folder, "source":

Burrowing into "source", there are build scripts:

It is simple, open a terminal and run each of those scripts in sequence. A vast improvement over the previous system is that no reboot is required; the host does not have to be running the newly-compiled kernel. Later on, I will create a master script that runs all of them in one go.

Here is the output:

The final script "7install" copies the .pet and .sfs files into appropriate places within woofQ2, so that the kernel can be used in the next build of EasyOS. In my case, they are also copied to where I keep files for uploading to ibiblio.org

Next up, I'm going to build Easy Excalibur with the 6.6.102 kernel and see if indeed there is any improvement with bootup.   

Tags: easy