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From Manoj Srivastava <[email protected]> on debian-user 6 Nov 2001.
Using make-kpkg is a very convenient way of compiling your
kernels for Debian GNU/Linux. The Package[]kernel-package takes all
the required steps for compiling a kernel so that the user need not
remember the actual sub-steps involved. Installation of the resulting
kernel is then trivial.
The Debian way allows you to keep multiple versions of kernel images
on the same machine with little effort. Even multiple flavours of the
same kernel version can easily be accommodated, You could have
kernel-image-2.4.16-686 and
kernel-image-2.4.16-p3hmsmp available and choosable at boot
time through lilo.
Other kernel module packages are also hooked into the Debian way of
dealing with kernels so that you can simply compile them as part of
the kernel compile process. This includes pcmcia-source
and alsa-source. Such modules generally rely on the
particular kernel version.
Debian also has the nice feature of keeping the configuration file for
each kernel image in /boot.
You can optionally apply patches to the kernel (supplied as
deb files) and build a patched kernel automatically.
You can compile a kernel for another computer, for example using a
fast machine to compile the kernel for installation on a slower
machine. This is really nice since the modules are all included in
the deb; and one does not have to deal with modules
manually. The postinst looks at a configuration file on the
installation machine (as opposed to the machine that the image was
compiled on), and allows the local admin to decide on issues of
symbolic links, and whether the boot loader stuff must be run, and
whether one wants to create a boot floppy or not. The postinst and
the postrm scripts allow the local admin on the installation machine
to add a script into runtime hooks; this can allow, amongst other
things, grub users to add and remove kernel image stanzas from the
grub menu (example scripts to do this are in the package).
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