Hello everyone, I apologize greatly about not having any updates recently. Well, updating the website with the new stuff never happened as maybe someone has noticed. I also recently found out that this project is now a featured project of the Linux Kernel Foundry. Nice! So in light of that I am going to try to be a little more active here. I also noted that Sourceforge had my old e-mail address so I wasn't getting mail from the mailing lists (whoops). But checking the archives, nobody posted anyway :-(.
As far as the lack of development goes, there are a few reasons. For one thing, my personal machine is a PII-350 that has served me well for some time now. However, it's really showing its age and the compile times on it are way off the charts compared to modern systems. Another issue has been the 2.4 kernel. Only now has the thing finally become stable. NeTraverse has rethought their patching system and their modules for the better and we now seem to have modules provided by Win4Lin itself which only require that mki-adapter be working properly. And since the mki-adapter is open source that should reduce issues with moving to newer kernels. In addition the part that actually patches the kernel sources has been modified quite a bit and it looks to me that it is much, much cleaner than before. Kudos to the developers at NeTraverse!
On the nVidia front, NV has released 2314 which again fixes issues with console switching between X sessions (at least for me). I torture tested it by running a dir /s /a in a DOS box in Win95 in an fwin session while switching back and forth a number of times between the two X sessions. Hopefully this issue won't creep back into a later release, and I won't discover that it still exists in this one.
While we're speaking of nVidia stuff, I took the source (bash) from my NVIDIA_kernel package and reworked it as a python script. While doing this I took out the hardcoded specfile name and made it a command line option. I also changed some things so that it is possible to build an RPM of the nVidia driver against a non-RPM kernel. In the future I am looking to have an emu10k1 package like this and possibly others. What I'd really like is to generalize the framework enough so that companies like nVidia and Creative can use this as part of their releases.
I have already put up kernel packages (with Win4Lin turned on) for the i686 (Pentium Pro and later) architecture. I have already built packages for athlon, i586, and i386 though the only one which has been verified to boot (on my PII-350) is the i686 kernel. I will be testing the athlon version in a couple days when I get back to work and install it on my machine there.
In addition to the Win4Lin kernels I am currently building kernels with CONFIG_MKI turned off (but the patch is still applied). Looking at the patch it seems that aside from what amounts to some define renaming (which is harmless) with CONFIG_MKI turned off the kernel will not have any effective modifications. Right now the athlon version is building, the rest will follow.
Those of you looking forward to new nVidia packages will have to wait just a bit (but not too long, I promise). I recently created a new script named kapbuild.py (mentioned above) and want to clean up a couple rough edges before I unleash it on unsuspecting users and developers. :-)
Anyways, that is about it for now I think. I'll continue uploading the packages to sourceforge (I think it takes longer to upload them than to built them). And I promise to keep ya posted from now on (hopefully).
Well, it's been quite a while since I've made any major updates to this site! For one thing, NeTraverse had quite a delay in getting out Win4Lin 3 with Kernel 2.4 support and so my 2.2.18 RPMs served me well for quite a while and I didn't see the need to upgrade. I even used them with Red Hat 7.1 for a while. There are a number of other things delaying the release such as my relocation from Indiana to Virginia, but to make a long story short I have finally gotten some things done and will be working more on this website shortly.
For one thing, I finally downloaded Win4Lin 3 and their patched Red Hat 2.4.2 kernel. Of course by this time Red Hat's 2.4.3 was already out so I figured might as well upgrade to the latest with the fixes. Unfortunately, the new kernel has PNPBIOS support and therefore it changes the GDT table. However I did get the damn thing patched after a couple days of on and off hacking on it. I have no idea if this patch is any good beyond the fact that my system has been running stably since then (yes, uptime is a whopping 9 days at this point). I also managed to get the new nVidia drivers compiled and boy are they nice. I especially love the nVidia splash screen rather than a garbled display when starting X. It is a very nice touch. The X server also seems not to crash when I run multiple instances of it on different consoles (i.e. using fwin). Kudos to nVidia. I still wish that the whole driver was open source but it is very reasonable at this point.
Keep your eyes peeled. Hopefully by the end of the day I can have this website updated with the new content.
Moved website to kernelrpm.sourceforge.net (you're looking at it). Still need to move some of the downloads to Sourceforge.
Started migration to sourceforge.net, the i686 Win4Lin kernel is now available on sourceforge. Go to the Kernel RPM homepage at sourceforge.net.
Okay, I now have kernel, nVidia, and pcmcia built for i586 with and without Win4Lin support and i686 with Win4Lin support. In addition I have finished putting all the source files into the RPM/SOURCES directory with the exception of the kernel source itself (go download it from kernel.org). I am still providing the full src.rpm for the base kernel, but I suggest that you do not download it because it is huge and includes the 2.2.18 source as an src.rpm should, but my internet connection really isn't equipped to handle lots of people downloading it. Instead grab all of the files in the SOURCES directory along with the kernel-2.2-biscuit.spec.
On the other hand, for the other packages which are significantly smaller just go ahead and grab the src.rpm (e.g. nVidia and pcmcia) and make your life easier.
Finally I am release the next major update to the Biscuit kernels. The new version is 2.2.18-0_biscuit_6. Release 5 actually did happen and included supermount and ReiserFS as well as an update to pre21 which was current at the time. I never released it because I did not trust the supermount stuff, although it never did crash my system but I never used the supermount stuff either. The new version includes ReiserFS but I decided supermount is way too big of a hack and touches too many things to be included unless some kind soul would like to port it to 2.2.18. Again, I don't use supermount and find it useless when userspace equivilants exist, but if you really want it, then port it and e-mail it to me (preferably in diff -u format). I'll then put it into the next release.
I am also in the process of restructuring the directories on the site. There is now an RPM/ directory where new stuff will be available for download. As I compile for other architectures and other configurations, binaries will begin appearing there. I will also be putting the new source files up for the kernel too.
The NVIDIA source package did not require any changes to build on 2.2.18 so I just rebuilt it and was done. The PCMCIA package required a minor change and I forgot to update the release number-- no big deal since the release of the kernel modules RPM follows the release of the kernel it is built against. So grab the new source package of PCMCIA if you are rolling your own.
Google has indexed this website now, it seems that I am at the top of the list when searching for "Win4Lin kernel RPM" and still on the first page of results when searching without the first keyword. Apparently at least a few other people have found this page useful ;-).
I think I finally have it perfected this time... well just about anyway. The spec files now use the --define parameter to RPM, and so don't have to be edited to make different types of kernels. Of course only the normal and win4lin configs have been built, so YMMV. The new release is 0_biscuit_4. I encourage anyone using 0_biscuit_1 to go ahead and update to this new release if you want the benefits from the modified server-tuning patch or if you want to sleep better knowing that you are running 2.2.18pre17 instead of 2.2.18pre15.
Apparently I finally made a bug-free release (pause to knock on wood). The new release specifies the cpu type as part of the name of the source package, so now you can have two different sources installed that differ only by their CPU type.
This release also provides complete support for making an initrd. I tested it out on my desktop and I am pleased to say that having lilo configured with the linux image name pointing at the /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd.img symlinks, installing a kernel is a simple matter of:
# rpm -ivh kernel-w4l-2.2.18-0_biscuit_4.i686.rpm # lilo
Honestly, I think my mom could probably do that. I have also provided a package for the NVIDIA kernel driver. It can be built before installing the new kernel. The only thing that needs to be installed to build it is the source for the new kernel. It's REALLY damn easy to do, check this out:
# rpm -ivh kernel-w4l-i686-source-2.2.18-0_biscuit_4.i686.rpm $ rpm --target=i686-redhat-linux --define "KRPMVER 2.2.18" \ --define "KRPMREL 0_biscuit_4" --define "kspecial -w4l" \ -ba NVIDIA_kernel-biscuit.spec
It's also perfectly legit to specify installing the new NVIDIA module at the same time as the new kernel. In fact, that is how I installed on my system.
PCMCIA building is just as simple, install the source as shown above and then execute the following command:
$ rpm --target=i686-redhat-linux --define "KRPMVER 2.2.18" \ --define "KRPMREL 0_biscuit_4" --define "kspecial -w4l" \ -ba pcmcia-biscuit.spec
Building the kernel is now accomplished with the following command:
$ rpm --target=i686-redhat-linux --define "kernel_win4lin 1" \ -ba kernel-2.2-biscuit.spec
To build a normal kernel, define kernel_normal to 1 instead of kernel_win4lin. Don't forget you need the full source rpm. Release 0_biscuit_3 will actually give you the source files you need, but not the correct spec file, so don't forget to use the spec from the new w4l kernel regardless of which kernel you are actually building. Also, to build SMP and SMP-Win4Lin you will need to create new config files yourself. It's easy to do, simply run rpm -bp instead of -ba and then when it exits run make xconfig or make menuconfig or whatever. Then copy the .config file to the appropriately named file in the SOURCES directory and you are good to go. Don't forget that you need a config for i386, i486, i586, and i686 to make the spec file happy. I will be attempting this sometime in the near future although I don't actually have an SMP system to test it on. Anyone care to buy me one??? Might want to hold off until I can get a dual Athlon though, it looks like it could be really cool! For now I am chugging along on a PII 350, so please don't laugh!
I have updated to 2.2.18pre17 and have made several adjustments to the provides/obsoletes lines of the spec files. You can now remove the kernel package and the kernel-w4l package will provide the kernel requirement. This is necessary because several packages have requirements that check for kernel >= 2.2.0 or something like that. The same thing has been done with the doc, headers, and source packages to ensure any yet-to-be-determined dependencies on kernel-source and the like are correctly fulfilled. The only package which obsoletes other packages is the headers package. It obsoletes any kernel-headers package less than or equal to it's version-release. That means it won't obsolete the kernel-headers package from a stock RH 7 install, but should obsolete the RH 6.2 kernel package.
In addition to fixing the provides, I have also modified the spec to include the configs for every supported architecture. This new version is release 0_biscuit_3 and is currently only available as binary i686 packages. The binary i586 and nosource packages will be available shortly. In addition, I will be building the normal (not Win4Lin) kernel for i586 to generate the complete source rpm and a baseline kernel that can be used to determine if problems you are having may be due to the win4lin patched kernel.
But wait, there's more... I have also built PCMCIA and I am providing a .src.rpm and binary i686 packages. The only reason I chose to build i686 is because I was already building the 686 kernel. An i586 version will be up very shortly after the new release of the i586 kernel goes up.
Well, SH-FUCK. I knew the good luck had to end somewhere. There is a small bug in the post install script for the win4lin enabled kernels that I didn't find until I went to actually install it on my laptop. It's a minor syntax error that has been fixed for the normal kernel. I will be rebuilding these kernels (with the same release) as soon as the normal kernel is done building properly and is up on this website.
Okay, here's the deal. 0_biscuit_3 has the somewhat broken post install script. I also don't like the way I am using defines at the top of the file which must be edited, so I am going to move to using the --define option with RPM so I can have a completely unified spec.
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