I'm trying to update the kernel on a CentOS 6 machine with a vanilla 3.1.0-rc10 kernel. It seems to work, except the modules that get created are significantly larger in size than those that come from the distro RPM. Thats an issues, because the mkinitrd command ends up creating a initram file that is 100M (because of the some of all the modules inside) in size. Grub takes forever to load and decompress a 100M initram file at boot.
In short:
- I downloaded the kernel code.
- Copied the running kernel config from/boot/config-2.6.xxx to .config in my kernel code dir.
- ran
make oldconfigand accepted the defaults - ran
make && make modules_install - ran
mkinitrd /boot/initramfs-3.1.0-rc10.x86_64.img 3.1.0-rc10
The resulting /boot/initramfs-3.1.0-rc10.x86_64.img is 100M in size.
Its clearly because the size of the modules is so much larger; picking the qla4xxxx you can see my compiled version is 3.6M vs the distros 116K. This is the case for all the modules.
[root@localhost ~]# ls -lh /lib/modules/2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64/kernel/drivers/scsi/qla4xxx/qla4xxx.ko
-rwxr--r--. 1 root root 116K May 19 23:37 /lib/modules/2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64/kernel/drivers/scsi/qla4xxx/qla4xxx.ko
[root@localhost ~]# ls -lh /lib/modules/3.1.0-rc10+/kernel/drivers/scsi/qla4xxx/qla4xxx.ko
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3.6M Oct 21 12:57 /lib/modules/3.1.0-rc10+/kernel/drivers/scsi/qla4xxx/qla4xxx.ko
I've done this before without issue; what am I overlooking here?
Run
strip --strip-unneededon the module to remove extraneous symbols. If that doesn't do it, runsizeon both modules to see where the difference lies. Note that this makes debugging somewhat more difficult.