Mind. Officially. Blown. Sometimes the coincidental timeliness of things popping up on Hacker News is just weird. u ROCK deepseagirl!<p>I've recently wanted to start building Linux kernels and play with device drivers again. Wanted to build and then execute on top of QEMU. Downloaded, configured, and built Linux kernel 6.6 following recipes from arch and a few other places. Doing a reasonable .config was a painful process (picking what to include etc.) The kernel build took several hours. The resulting image refused to boot under Virtual Machine Manager, to say nothing of using gdb etc. to interactively debug the kernel.<p>So, I figured I was looking at a solid weekend of googling, stack-overflowing, swearing, reading kernel Documentation files etc. and finally getting everything set up and working happily.<p>NOT! The easylkb script did the entire thing completely automatically, culminating in a login prompt on a running virtual machine!! The Linux kernel .config was one of the standard ones I believe, but I hadn't yet found it. The complete kernel build took on the order of several minutes instead of several hours.<p>There were a couple of minor issues I had with easylkb, which I will share as comments on github.
I found the NixOS wiki[1] to have a fairly decent guide on how to hack on a kernel. The process there isn't nearly as concise as it is here though :)<p>[1]: <a href="https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Linux_kernel" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Linux_kernel</a>
I've wanted to do some Linux kernel development for a while now, but I've never mustered the will to go through the process.<p>This script may just be what I needed to start.
Ooooh this is very cute.<p>I'm toying with building a little OS using the Linux kernel and an all-Go userspace, and one of the goals is to make the entire system as easy to cross-compile (both host OS <i>and</i> host/guest CPU arch) as possible. Linux being non-trivial to compile (let alone cross-compile) has been so far quite a nuissance, so I'll definitely be having a closer look at this.
This caught my attention because I'm obsessing about storage performance (again) and have included a kernel build in my benchmarks. I found and followed the instructions at <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/BuildADebianKernelPackage" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wiki.debian.org/BuildADebianKernelPackage</a> which were trivially simple.<p>As an aside, I was astonished that the build took less than 100s. My recollection is that this took about an hour on on my previous system (I7-4770K, 32GB RAM and SATA SSD formatted with ZFS.) New system is Ryzen 7 7700X, 32GB RAM and NVME SSD. I expected a performance boost, but not that much. I'm still wondering what I did wrong/differently.