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Install Kernel (Arch Linux ver.)

This is a note of my development of a Linux kernel on Arch Linux. Basically, I use Ubuntu for my research, but when I tried to install a custom kernel on Arch Linux, I found that the same procedure as on Ubuntu did not work. I will show you how to compile and install without using PKGBUILD.

Download Source Code​

The kernel source code was downloaded from the following URL.

https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.17.tar.gz

curl -O  https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.17.tar.gz
tar xf linux-5.17.tar.gz

Install Neccesary Packages​

Install packages necessary for compilation. Without installing cpio, generation of kernel headers failed.

sudo pacman -S bc cpio

Build​

Generate .config file​

The .config file is not created by make olddefconfig, but uses the Arch default settings.

zcat /proc/config.gz > .config

Compile & Install​

Compile kernel images and modules, and install modules.

make -j5 && make modules_install

Move the created image to /boot.

cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-linux517

initramfs​

Two configuration files are needed to generate the initramfs image. The first is a copy of /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, which contains additional modules and compression format changes.

I added vfat because the FAT32 formatted EFI partition, /boot failed to mount when vfat was not included. Also, the /boot partition was not allocated a very large space, and the disk space was insufficient, so I specified xz compression, which has a high compression ratio.

cp /etc/mkinitcpio.conf /etc/mkinitcpio-linux517.conf
- MODULES=()
+ MODULES=(vfat)
...
- #COMPRESSION="xz"
+ COMPRESSION="xz"

The second configuration file is /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux517.preset. This is like a template for creating initramfs with mkinitcpio, and is used by modifying the original linux.preset file. The only changes are to the kernel image file path and the /etc/mkinitcpio-linux517.conf file path.

cp /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux517.preset
# mkinitcpio preset file for the 'linux' package

ALL_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
ALL_kver="/boot/vmlinuz-linux517"

PRESETS=('default')

default_config="/etc/mkinitcpio-linux517.conf"
default_image="/boot/initramfs-linux517.img"
#default_options=""

#fallback_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
fallback_image="/boot/initramfs-linux517-fallback.img"
fallback_options="-S autodetect"

Finally, generate initramfs by following command.

mkinitcpio -p linux517

GRUB Config & Reboot​

Update the GRUB configuration and reboot.

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
reboot