Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] (sort of) strange things after upgrading the kernel

[Dale]

Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Sunday 14 October 2012 15:46:43 Dale wrote:
>> Francisco Ares wrote:
>>> As my old kernel is from the 2.6 series and the new is from the
>>> 3.4, I decided to do a "menuconfig" from scratch. I do use "lspci"
>>> and also I always build the kernel allowing "/proc/config.gz", so
>>> it is easy to get exactly what is working, although I keep my own
>>> bacup copies of ".config", for future references. When I am
>>> building a kernel, I use to open the latest ".config" in a
>>> separate console, for reference. That has kept me of forgetting
>>> plenty of details.
>>>
>> I can understand why.  There would have been a huge number of new
>> options to check on.  Doing it from scratch with menuconfig could
>> have been just as fast or maybe even faster.  May have been worth
>> trying but may have ended up with more issues.
> I found long ago that menuconfig flags new options with [NEW] to the right
> of the option name, so it's easy to find out what's changed since you
> last ran a config operation. That can easily reduce a several-hours config
> job to no more than half an hour. Still quite a task, but not in the
> same league as configuring from scratch.
>


It does but you have to go through each menu to see what is new and what
is not and that's a lot of menus and submenus etc, etc.  It still
increases the odds of missing something.  Heck, even tho I use lspci -k
to make sure I have everything included for hardware, there is always
some piece of software that wants something added.  Those are really
hard to keep track of, unless you make a lot of notes.  That's where
oldconfig comes in since it only adjusts the new stuff and leaves the
old stuff like it was.

Using oldconfig is the fastest and easiest and as a general rule gives
you a good kernel.  But when you are upgrading from that many version
ago, you could end up with something flakey or other odd things. 

I think the OP likely did the best thing by just starting over.  Also,
maybe now he knows to upgrade a little more often.  lol  We often learn
this the hard way.  Just like when people don't sync and upgrade the OS
for a year or two.  Depending on changes, reinstalling may be easier
depending on what issues have cropped up in that time and how fast a rig
can compile things.  Again, it just depends on the situation and even
then can be a toss up as to which is the right way to go.  Those of us
that have been around here a long time have seen people try to update a
badly out of date OS just to run into so many issues that they end up
reinstalling again anyway.  The time spent trying to fix it can be
longer than just starting over sometimes.  Not to mention having hair
left.  ;-) 

Me, I might would have tried it but not going to argue over it.  The OP
is up and running and that is the important thing.  It was only a few
electrons that were bent out of shape.  lol

Dale

:-)  :-) 

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!