- We do not use latest 4.9.x because it relies on a new version of
binutils, while older versions do not. (Note: we should be able to go
a bit newer but I didn't bother testing >50 versions to figure this
out).
- We do not use newer kernel versions because they require one or more
of (new perl, new binutils, new make, new gcc, new bison, new tar).
- sysb and sysc are updated to use the SATA (libata) subsystem (aka sda)
instead of IDE-emulating SATA subsystem (aka hda) which is now
available to us.
- While theoretically according to docs 4.9 should work OOTB with our
version of binutils this is not the case, so we have to do a bit of
(interesting) patching. But this does not break anything.
- Thankfully serial support in 4.9 is not screwed over like it is in 2.6
so we can revert to that.
- 4.9 has the linux-libre project at our disposal, instead of gNewSense.
So we use this. Unfortunatley that takes forever because we have to
use sed because our version of gawk is too old/buggy. :( I plan to
introduce very shortly 1. parallelism 2. 'sysc snapshot' which will
start from sysc to avoid this. I do not want to use linux-libre
tarballs because they make modificiations directly from this script
(aka not easily verifiable, use the source!) and this script allows
for much greater flexibility.
- We compile the initramfs ahead-of-build using the in-tree cpio
generator instead of also building cpio to use less packages. We do
NOT build the initramfs into the kernel like 2.6 (unsupported).
- Oh and fix a kexec-tools checksum.
d429c48d76