Sunday 19 June 2011

How to use a 64bit machine to build & install a 32bit Linux kernel for another PC

I've often had the problem of having to build a Linux kernel for a slow machine, while having a much faster machine available. In my case, the slow machine is an Asus EEE-PC running 32bit Fedora, and my faster machine is an Intel i7 running 64bit Fedora.

In order for the faster 64bit machine to build a kernel and install it on the slower 32bit, you'll need to bear in mind three issues:

* How to build a 32bit kernel on a 64bit machine
* How to give access to the slower machine for installing the kernel
* How to actually install the kernel on the slower machine.


How to build a 32bit kernel on a 64bit machine

Assuming you already have kernel source and a suitable .config available on the faster machine, simply run your usual kernel make, with the addition of ARCH=x86 and with menuconfig as a target. In my case, this would be:

fast$: make ARCH=x86 -j16 O=/home/mark/Source/build-linux-2.6-32bit/ menuconfig

Then deselect the top option "[ ] 64-bit kernel" before exiting and saving. Now you can build the kernel with:

fast$: make ARCH=x86 -j16 O=/home/mark/Source/build-linux-2.6-32bit/

Note that the '-j' option gives the number of simultaneous jobs the make can handle, which is usually 2x the number of processors/cores in your system. I have 8 cores, so I use them all by specifying '-j16'.

The O= specifies the build directory where the build objects are placed. The .config you wish to use should go in here. There are many reasons why it is a good idea to have separate build and source dirs.


How to give access to the slower machine for installing the kernel

You could also use a Samba share for this, but I prefer using NFS. Note that this isn't the most secure method, using NFS in this way, but it works.

On the remote, slower, machine with NFS installed, export your root (/) and boot (/boot) directories by editing the /etc/exports file or using the system-config-nfs program. My /etc/exports file looks like this:

/boot *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
/     *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

Then restart the NFS services nfs. nfslock and rpcbind (portmap on older systems):


slow$: sudo service rpcbind restart
slow$: sudo service nfslock restart
slow$: sudo service nfs restart

Now it should be possible to remotely mount these exports on the faster machine, replace <remote-ip> by the name or IP address of the remote PC:

fast$: mkdir ~/remote-root
fast$: mkdir ~/remote-boot
fast$: sudo mount -t nfs <remote-ip>:/ ~/remote-root
fast$: sudo mount -t nfs <remote-ip>:/boot ~/remote-boot


Installing the kernel on the slower machine

Almost there, we just need to install the kernel image on the slower machine and reboot to run it!
For this to work seamlessly, a small patch is needed to the /sbin/installkernel script (on my Fedora machine, at least):


--- /sbin/installkernel
+++ /sbin/installkernel
@@ -32,7 +32,10 @@
cfgLoader=1
fi
-LINK_PATH=/boot
+if [ -z "$LINK_PATH" ]; then
+ LINK_PATH=/boot
+fi
+
RELATIVE_PATH=`echo "$INSTALL_PATH/" | sed "s|^$LINK_PATH/||"`
KERNEL_VERSION=$1
BOOTIMAGE=$2

Now we can export some environment variables to tell the kernel make install scripts where we would like our kernel and modules to be installed (Note the difference between remote-root and remote-boot!), while logged in as the superuser:

fast#: export INSTALL_PATH=/home/mark/remote-boot/
fast#: export LINK_PATH=/home/mark/remote-boot/
fast#: export INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/home/mark/remote-root/

For a Samba export, just replace the exported variables above with their equivalents (usually ~/.gvfs/root\ on\ remote/ or similar for Fedora).
Now we can simply run the install make targets on our fast machine, which installs to our slower, 32bit target PC:

fast#: make ARCH=x86 O=/home/mark/Source/build-linux-2.6-32bit/ modules_install install

Then edit your grub.conf (or equivalent, as I haven't yet found out why /sbin/new-kernel-pkg doesn't update this automagically on the remote machine).

Reboot, select the new kernel from the GRUB menu (or equivalent), and happy hacking!