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9.2.4. Compiling and Building the Package
Clean Up Before If you have already compiled a kernel in the directory and wish to rebuild everything Rebuilding from scratch (for example because you substantially changed the kernel configura- tion), you will have to run make clean to remove the compiled files. make distclean
removes even more generated files, including your .config file, so make sure to back it up first.
Clean Up Before If you have already compiled a kernel in the directory and wish to rebuild everything Rebuilding from scratch (for example because you substantially changed the kernel configura- tion), you will have to run make clean to remove the compiled files. make distclean
removes even more generated files, including your .config file, so make sure to back it up first.
Once the kernel configuration is ready, a simple make deb-pkg will generate up to five Debian packages in standard .deb format: linux-image-version, which contains the kernel image and the associated modules; linux-headers-version, which contains the header files required to build ex- ternal modules; linux-firmware-image-version, which contains the firmware files needed by some drivers (this package might be missing when you build from the kernel sources provided by Debian or Kali); linux-image-version-dbg, which contains the debugging symbols for the kernel image and its modules; and linux-libc-dev, which contains headers relevant to some user-space libraries like GNU’s C library (glibc).
The version is defined by the concatenation of the upstream version (as defined by the vari- ables VERSION, PATCHLEVEL, SUBLEVEL, and EXTRAVERSION in the Makefile), of the LOCALVERSION configuration parameter, and of the LOCALVERSION environment variable. The package version reuses the same version string with an appended revision that is regularly incremented (and stored in .version), except if you override it with the KDEB_PKGVERSION environment variable.
$ make deb-pkg LOCALVERSION=-custom KDEB_PKGVERSION=$(make kernelversion)-1
[...]
$ ls ../*.deb
../linux-headers-4.9.0-kali1-custom_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
../linux-image-4.9.0-kali1-custom_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
../linux-image-4.9.0-kali1-custom-dbg_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
../linux-libc-dev_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
$ make deb-pkg LOCALVERSION=-custom KDEB_PKGVERSION=$(make kernelversion)-1
[...]
$ ls ../*.deb
../linux-headers-4.9.0-kali1-custom_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
../linux-image-4.9.0-kali1-custom_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
../linux-image-4.9.0-kali1-custom-dbg_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
../linux-libc-dev_4.9.2-1_amd64.deb
To actually use the built kernel, the only step left is to install the required packages with dpkg
-i file.deb. The “linux-image” package is required; you only have to install the “linux-headers” package if you have some external kernel modules to build, which is the case if you have some
“*-dkms” packages installed (check with dpkg -l ”*-dkms” | grep ^ii). The other packages are generally not needed (Unless you know why you need them!).