[LAU] Building a Debian realtime kernel

Hiho, I've finally tried to make a realtime kernel for Debian, as posted on my site here: http://www.nescivi.nl/?p=111 (and also below, but without cross- references). However, I'm still getting xruns in jackd, at rather uncritical settings (large period sizes...). So I'm wondering what else could be going wrong... I also found it a bit weird that the Debian package building did not make the initrd image. sincerely, Marije ---------------------- I’ve finally sat down and tried to make a realtime kernel for Debian, for my 64bit machine. I followed the instructions I found in this post on the Debian forums. First, I got the Debian sources for 2.6.29, from my repository (so using synaptic). It puts the sources in /usr/src. Then I got the latest realtime patches from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/rt/ Then I made a dir in my home directory mkdir kernel cd kernel cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.29.tar.gz . tar -xf linux-source-2.6.29.tar.gz mv linux-source-2.6.29 linux-2.6.29-source-rt cd linux-2.6.29-source-rt bzcat ../patch-2.6.29.4-rt16.bz2 |patch -p1 I added this to the Makefile: EXTRAVERSION = -rt16 To start from my current kernel configuration make oldconfig Then I got a whole bunch of questions, most of which I answered taking the default options. Only for the realtime-preemption question I chose option 4, the realtime option. I looked at the options with menuconfig, but didn’t really change anything more there. The timer frequency mentioned in the post above seems to be preceded by the dynamic ticks option, which was turned on. make menuconfig I had to unselect “staging” and the “comedi” drivers as these caused errors during building, and according to some messages on LAU I don’t really need it. Build a kernel the Debian way: make-kpkg clean time fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd -rev mz1 kernel_image kernel_headers To also build a source package: time fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd -rev mz1 kernel_image kernel_headers kernel_source This will take a while. Your new kernel & headers now live in ../kernel Use dpkg -i to install (as root). dpkg -i ../linux-headers-*.deb ../linux-image-*.deb So good so far… but the kernel didn’t boot yet… and the initrd file was missing So with the initramfs-tools from the debian repository, I did (as root) mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.29-rt16 2.6.29-rt16 which created the initrd image. Also editing it appropriately in grub (/boot/grub/menu.lst) so that the boot process knows about it.