Compile and install pure Kernel on Debian

Question

I'm trying to compile and install the kernel-4.9.8 sources from https://kernel.org on Debian 8 (jessie).

I'm following this procedure:

• make defconfig
• make menuconfig
• make

I managed to compile the sources succesfully, but I can't install the kernel, I've tried with both sudo make install and sudo dkms autoinstall -k 4.9.8, but they seems to require linux-headers-4.9.8 and I can't find it the Debian repositories.

Answer 1

Try using make-kpkg instead. When run from a kernel source tree it'll compile a kernel and build a full set of debian packages using that source and config -- linux-image, linux-headers, linux-doc, all as per your version specified.

It's part of the kernel-package package, so what you want to do is:

1. sudo apt-get install kernel-package
2. Edit /etc/kernel-img.conf and /etc/kernel-kpg.conf to match your preferences
3. fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd linux-image
4. Sit back, get some tea. The above process will take a while.

It will generate a linux-image-(version) deb package one level up, which you can then install with dpkg and will handle things like calling your bootloader's update to add the new kernel automatically. This will significantly ease your difficulties.

At the end of this process, you will have a Linux kernel that has the exact capabilities you told it to have, and none of the capabilities that you didn't tell it to have.

Consider that last sentence a polite warning.