[gentoo-user] OT ( was : Cannot boot 2.6.21-gentoo-r4)

[Billy Wayne McCann <thebillywayne@gmail.com>]

Albert Hopkins wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-07-17 at 15:19 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Mick wrote:
>>> On Tuesday 17 July 2007 13:20, Billy McCann wrote:
>>>> Hi Mick.   From what I understand, using oldconfig for major
>>>> version changes (.20 -> .21) is a bad idea.  Here's what I did.  It
>>>> may be slow and stupid but it worked like a charm.
>>> Sure, but I have been using oldconfig for previous major changes and
>>> never had a problem like this before.
>> Now you know why the kernel devs keep telling you not to do it, heh :-)
>>
> 
> I don't know which kernel dev keeps saying that, but I'd recommend
> he/she specify what is meant by "major version" since, historically:
> 
> 2.6.22
> ^ ^ ^
> | | +--- Revision
> | +----- Minor version
> +------- Major version
> 
> And therefore .20 -> .21 would not be considered a "major" version
> change by most accounts.
> 
> --
> Albert W. Hopkins

Thanks for correcting my nomenclature, Albert.  I too was wanting to use
oldconfig for upgrading my kernel from .20 to .21, but decided not to
after reading the recommendation of the Gentoo Kernel Upgrade Guide, the
relevant portion of which I have pasted below. Perhaps this applied only
to the specific example used.

My purpose for pasting this into this discussion is three-fold: to show
why I said what I did, to hopefully dispel the notion that I merely made
this all up, and to discuss the relevance of the pasted text itself.

I apologize for being off-topic and hope that Mick finds himself a
working kernel config soon.  :)


Billy Wayne

=====================

(Note the the second and third sentences of the second paragraph.)

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/kernel-upgrade.xml

10. Advanced: Using your old kernel .config to configure a new one

It is sometimes possible to save time by re-using the configuration file
from your old kernel when configuring the new one. Note that this is
generally unsafe -- too many changes between every kernel release for
this to be a reliable upgrade path.

The only situation where this is appropriate is when upgrading from one
Gentoo kernel revision to another. For example, the changes made between
gentoo-sources-2.6.9-r1 and gentoo-sources-2.6.9-r2 will be very small,
so it is usually OK to use the following method. However, it is not
appropriate to use it in the example used throughout this document:
upgrading from 2.6.8 to 2.6.9. Too many changes between the official
releases, and the method described below does not display enough context
to the user, often resulting in the user running into problems because
they disabled options that they really didn't want to.

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