[Kernel-handbook-general] backporting 3.13 from experimental to wheezy

[Faheem Mitha]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Faheem Mitha wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> See http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/115921/4671
>
> I'm trying to backport 3.13 to wheezy, using instructions in the kernel
> handbook, namely
> http://kernel-handbook.alioth.debian.org/ch-common-tasks.html#s4.2.5.
>
> The main stumbling block seems to be (so far) that gcc 4.8 is required,
> indeed hardwired into the build. This seems to have been done by Debian, as I
> don't see a reason why Linux itself would require it. This has the effect in
> this instance of making this packaging somewhat backport-unfriendly.
>
> Incidentally, the handbook refers to flavors, but does not say what the
> possible flavors are. Also, it seems for amd64, one needs to set arch to i386
> and flavor to amd64, which is confusing.
>
> Can you advise on how one can configure the build to use 4.7 on wheezy, if
> possible? Thanks.
>
>                                                          Regards, Faheem

Thanks to some detective work by Anthony DeRobertis, we figured out that
changing the compiler version in debian/config/defines was probably the
way to go. For completeness, the patch I'm currently using against the
Debian sources is below.

I use the following commands to try to build:

     fakeroot debian/rules source

followed by

     fakeroot make -f debian/rules.gen binary-arch_amd64_none_amd64

I managed to get this working, though I was having some weird failures 
before.I had to pop and push my patch against the source before it worked, 
which makes no sense.

                                                           Regards, Faheem

# HG changeset patch
# Parent 81a16b960a67fa08c9a298bc03c5acfd3d6f7437

diff -r 81a16b960a67 debian/config/amd64/defines
--- a/debian/config/amd64/defines
+++ b/debian/config/amd64/defines
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
  kernel-arch: x86

  [build]
-debug-info: true
+debug-info: false

  [image]
  bootloaders: grub-pc extlinux lilo
diff -r 81a16b960a67 debian/config/defines
--- a/debian/config/defines
+++ b/debian/config/defines
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
   sparc
   sparc64
   x32
-compiler: gcc-4.8
+compiler: gcc-4.7
  featuresets:
   none
   rt
@@ -50,4 +50,4 @@

  # initramfs-generators
  initramfs-fallback: linux-initramfs-tool
-initramfs-tools: initramfs-tools (>= 0.110~)
+initramfs-tools: initramfs-tools (>= 0.109.1)
diff -r 81a16b960a67 debian/config/i386/defines
--- a/debian/config/i386/defines
+++ b/debian/config/i386/defines
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
   i386/config.486

  [686-pae_build]
-debug-info: true
+debug-info: false

  [686-pae_description]
  hardware: modern PCs