When to Recompile

There was a time when all SUSE Linux users were warned to take a blood oath never to recompile a SUSE kernel. The SUSE engineers had worked endlessly to make sure everything worked just so and had the best device drivers you could get. Compiling new modules into this carefully balanced and functional kernel could lead to disaster.

Today, SUSE Linux is designed to be an "enthusiast's" (read "tinkerer's") version of the operating system. So as a user, you are almost expected to want to tweak every setting to squeeze the most amount of performance and individuality you can get out of your computer. There's even a kernel-of-the-day directory on the SUSE server that is accessible for any user via YOU and APT. Don't ever use this on a production system, but if you really like the bleeding edge of development, you can be there every day.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of SUSE Linux users can (and should) rely on the kernel shipped (and occasionally updated) by SUSE. Those engineers have not been slacking on the job; they still work endlessly to make sure your system is as stable and as high performing as it could possibly be. When security holes are discovered in the kernel, a patched kernel will be in the YOU servers almost instantly.

Tip

To learn more about SUSE's process in building kernels, check out /usr/src/linux/README.SUSE. This file is included in the kernelsources package.

When should you violate the Don't Recompile a SUSE Kernel rule? You are permitted to come up with your own exceptions, but these three are probably the best reasons:

• To accommodate a really new, or obscure, piece of hardware.

• To update your entire system before a precompiled kernel is available. That is, you need a newly released kernel with a device driver that will finally solve a longstanding printer problem.

• If you are running SUSE on an older computer and you need to optimize the kernel to run on the older hardware.

As noted earlier, you can pick up RPM packages for new kernels by way of the SUSE kernel-of-the-day repositories. Include this repository in your apt sources.list file or use YaST to get it. This will simplify the installation process.

Caution

Always back up data before manually compiling a new kernel. You never know what can happen when you are essentially upgrading your OS.

After your new kernel is installed, reboot your system to load the new kernel.

Note

When you use YaST to install a new kernel (whether you're doing it yourself or YOU is getting a security patch), YaST will warn you about running the lilo bootloader before rebooting. It is safe to ignore this warning. Remember the default SUSE Linux bootloader is grub.