Updating the kernel
Posted: 13 Oct 2007, 13:16
I am a proud owner of a new Bubba server and in general I am satisfied with it apart from one thing: it's not clear how to upgrade the kernel. I noticed that on download.excito.net there are 3 kernels available, 2 of them newer than the 2.6.16.16 shipped by default, so there must be a way to do it. I want to be able to do it because some kernel features cannot be compiled as modules and I want to use them.
I did a little investigation:
mtd0 is the boot loader, which can bee seen by using cat /dev/mtd0 | strings
mtd2 seems to contain a gzipped ext2 initrd filesystem
mtd1, according to the description, is the kernel.
So, after compiling a new kernel with patches from download.excito.net, it would make sense if the kernel could be updated by writing the Image file to mtd1.
My questions, therefore, are:
1. Am I right that it can be done this way?
2. What happens if something bad is written to mtd1; can the system be recovered?
Thanks.
I did a little investigation:
Code: Select all
# cat /proc/mtd
dev: size erasesize name
mtd0: 00010800 00000210 "bootloader"
mtd1: 0018c000 00000210 "kernel"
mtd2: 00073800 00000210 "filesystem"
mtd2 seems to contain a gzipped ext2 initrd filesystem
mtd1, according to the description, is the kernel.
So, after compiling a new kernel with patches from download.excito.net, it would make sense if the kernel could be updated by writing the Image file to mtd1.
My questions, therefore, are:
1. Am I right that it can be done this way?
2. What happens if something bad is written to mtd1; can the system be recovered?
Thanks.