Thanks to Dave Paper, John J. Francini & Gyula Szkoly for the quick
replies.
My question was why you need to boot the generic kernel before compiling
a new kernel with support for new hardware.
The answer is simply that only the generic kernel has support for all
hardware which is known to your DU/TU system.
This is from Daves reply:
"if you add new hardware onto the host, and the current vmunix doesn't
have the driver for it, it won't be seen on boot, and when you go to
compile a new kernel for the host, the compilation process won't know
about the new hardware and won't know to include the driver for it.
Botting genvmunix will boot a kernel with a driver for every known pieces
of hardware that is supported, so when you go to build yourself a new
kernel it will have the entire library to pull drivers from, _AND_ because
the genvmunix kernel knows about every piece of hardware, it probes for
everything during boot, so the kernel build process will know to include a
driver in the new kernel for it."
Thanks a lot to the list
Goetz Golla
Received on Mon Jun 28 1999 - 20:51:25 NZST