Sunday, January 08, 2012
Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!
Even though today is the birthday of such luminaries as Elvis Presley and David Bowie, we must not neglect that today is also the day of the birth of the Supreme Commander of the cleanest race on the planet, the Sagacious Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong Un! Why he even bothers to grace this planet with his presence is just one more mysterious thing about him (personally, I hope he's not as batXXXX crazy as his father, but I don't have high hopes)
“One does not simply walk into a Linux kernel upgrade!”
I normally don't upgrade software unless there's a compelling reason for me to do so, and there are a few compelling reasons for me to upgrade the Linux kernel. It's not features that I can't live without (for I'm doing so right now) but there are some features, like signal and timer delivery via file descriptors, that have intrigued me enough to contemplate it.
Okay, in the late 90s I used to fairly regularly build custom Linux
kernels for my various computers. But that was in the
2.0–2.1 days, when 2.0.x was
the “stable” version, and 2.1.x was the “development”
version. These days, it's all development versions with the random
version, like 2.6.9 or 2.6.20, given the moniker
of “stable,” just because.
But really, how hard could it be?
Okay, I downloaded 3.1.8 (3.1? Already? I
thought 3.0 was just
released!), but it requires a later version of GCC than I
have. Okay, so I need a new version of GCC. Which probably requires the
latest binutils.
And because of new system calls since Linux 2.6.9 (which I'm
running), I need to upgrade glibc, and while I'm at it, a
few utilties like ps and lsof and …
Really? Is it this complicated? [Sean goes off, reads the Linux From Scratch Book and runs away screaming. Yup, it's that complicated. —Editor].
