From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.3) Gecko/20040803 Description of problem: I changed the default kernel from 2.4.21-20.ELsmp to 2.4.21-20.EL and rebooted my machine. Several header files were changed in /usr/src/linux-2.4.21-20.EL/include/config ... ls -lart shows these with date/time of the reboot: drwxr-xr-x 28 root root 4096 Nov 23 21:03 .. drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 Nov 23 21:03 x86 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19 Nov 23 21:03 smp.h -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 26 Nov 23 21:03 highmem64g.h -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27 Nov 23 21:03 highmem4g.h drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 23 21:03 cpu drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 23 21:03 ewrk3 drwxr-xr-x 373 root root 12288 Nov 23 21:03 . -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25 Nov 23 21:04 profiling.h -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 23 21:04 oprofile.h -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 23 21:04 MARKER But when I changed back to the smp kernel and rebooted, these files were not changed again. The problem arose when I tried to rebuild the vmware module vmmon. It complains that the headers do not match the running kernel. This situation was reported in bugzilla report 101669 and was dismissed as a vmware bug. But I can see the header files were changed and never changed back when I went back to the smp kernel. I can compare them with a machine that I kept the 2.4.21-20.ELsmp kernel running on and they are different. And this machine builds the vmmon module without problems. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-source-2.4.21-20.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Change the default kernel to non-smp in /boot/grub/grub.conf. 2.Reboot and see that files in /usr/src/linux-2.4.21-20.EL/include/config changed. 3.Change the default kernel back to smp and reboot and see that the files did not change back. Additional info:
Donna, the include/config subdirectory is dynamically generated as part of your build procedure (and also needs to be cleared out and rebuilt when you want to rebuild for a different config). What procedure are you using? (You're probably missing a "make mrproper" or a "make oldconfig" or a "make dep" to perform a fresh rebuild.)
Donna, I could not reproduce this. To the best of my knowledge, there is no automatic update of files under /usr/src/linux-`uname -r`/include/config at reboot. I searched among all scripts in /etc, /etc/rc.d, /etc/init.d, /sbin, and /usr/sbin. (There is a script, /sbin/mkkerneldoth, that changes /boot/kernel.h on each reboot, but it doesn't modify anything else.) In particular, the output of "ls -lt include/config" (while residing in /usr/src/linux-2.4.21-27.EL) matched before and after the reboot from an SMP kernel to the UP kernel (for 2.4.21-27.EL).