The Linux Kernel 4.3 has been released today, Monday the 2nd of November 2015. I have compiled it from source on a Virtual Box CentOS 7 minimum install the virtual machine for some further testing. I have also used my same old configuration file. You can also view detailed packages and commits on the git repo. Here, is a brief idea how to compile it from source.
1. You will need to download all the pre-requirements if you are on a minimum install.
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install ncurses-devel bc hmaccalc zlib-devel elfutils-libelf-devel binutils-devel qt-devel
2. Download the wget tools to download the Kernel itself.
yum install wget
3.Download and untar the kernel directory
wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/linux-4.3.tar.gz
tar -xvzf linux-4.3.tar.gz
4. You will need to ensure that the decompressed directory is in the /usr/src/kernels directory. If you have untar it at a location other than this one move the Linux-4.3 directory in the /usr/src/kernels
5. Choose your default kernel configuration options
make menuconfig
6. To use the old config file
make oldconfig
7. Compiling the kernel
make
8. Installing the kernel
make modules_install install
Tips:
-
- Be sure to get rid of too many old kernels files in the /boot directory to do not get confused.
- You can also use the command make olddefconfig to set the default values without prompting anew for configuration.
- To set different boot options use the command sudo grub2-set-default 0 – 0, in this case, is the default kernel.
- The command make usually take lots of time. If you have 4 vCPU, you can use make like this: make -j 4 where j stands for jobs and 4 for all the 4 CPUs
- uname -r allows you to find your kernel version. Example uname -r gives me 3.19.0-25-generic; i.e the letter 3 is the major, number 19 is the minor (developmental stage) and 0 is the revision number
