Changes in the kernel

[euspectre]

New stable kernels, 4.4.16 and 4.6.5, were published to the repositories at http://abf-downloads.rosalinux.ru/kerne ... osa2014.1/.

There are significant changes in these kernels or, to be exact, in their configuration and in the build scripts. Here they are:

1. PAE is now enabled in the 32-bit nrj-desktop and nrj-laptop kernels by default. Such kernels will be used in the ISO images of ROSA after ROSA R8.

Non-PAE kernels are no longer built. If anyone still needs a non-PAE kernel (I doubt, but still), well, we shall see about that.

2. Support for SELinux instead of TOMOYO is now built into the kernel. When a system starts, SELinux is disabled by default, so that the users should not notice a difference. To enable SELinux, one can add selinux=1 to the list of kernel options at boot.

This probably matters little for a home use of ROSA but may be helpful in some enterprise use cases. Of course, this alone does not make the system SELinux-aware: it is also needed for some userspace components to support SELinux as well. This, however, is beyond the scope of my work at the moment.

3. For the enthusiasts: it should now be easier to build RPMs with custom kernel variants tuned to your tastes, to try patches, experiment with configuration options and so on.

Preiously, the ROSA-specific kernel patches and parts of the configuration files were stored in a separate project, soft/kernel-patches-and-configs at ABF. The configuration was created using special scripts. This turned out to be not that convenient: adding even a trivial patch was sometimes tricky.

Things are much more straightforward now. All the patches and configuration files needed to build the kernel are kept in the same project as the .spec file. Here is the project for the kernel 4.6 for example: https://abf.io/kernels_stable/kernel-4.6.

The configuration files are now simply combined from the relevant parts when the kernel are built. For example, the configuration for nrj-desktop on 64-bit systems is created by concatenating kernel-x86_64.config (i.e. the common part) and kernel-nrj-desktop-x86_64.config (nrj-desktop-specific additions). For nrj-laptop, kernel-x86_64.config and kernel-nrj-laptop-x86_64.config are used.

The patches are now applied the same way as in any other RPM package, no need for separate scripts anymore.

So, if you would like to change something in the kernel, to experiments with the configuration and such - you are welcome! Just clone the project https://abf.io/kernels_stable/kernel-4.6 on ABF, edit the config fails to your liking, add or remove the patches and launch the build of the RPMs.

By the way, here are the test ISO images with the kernel 4.4.16 that was built using this new scheme:
https://abf.io/platforms/rosa2014.1/pro ... ists/15790

I suppose these ISO images will make it to the mirrors as well, after the release of ROSA R8.

All the changes I have described are made for the "unofficial" kernels 4.4.x and 4.6.x at the moment. If everything is OK with these, we may incorporate such changes into other kernel versions.