Linux Kernel - back to basics

It’s remarkable how time flies. It didn’t feel so long ago when I was building my own Linux kernel on PC with 8 MB of memory. But it was indeed long time ago..

I have the rare occasion to do it again today for a project I’m working on. It’s funny how rare this is nowadays. We are using it almost all the time but mostly through Linux distributions - Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and so on. But here I am looking at the build slowly going through drivers/net/ethernet/... again and I feel nostalgic.

The other funny thing is that make menuconfig feels kind of new. It’s the exact same menu interface but I had to read through the items because most I am seeing either for the first time or I had forgotten about them. So, I defaulted and didn’t do any edits - yeah, I’m busy! No time to hack around :D

Another interesting thing I found was those scripts I had to run:

scripts/config --disable SYSTEM_TRUSTED_KEYS
scripts/config --disable SYSTEM_REVOCATION_KEYS

I don’t recall having to do that back in the old days. I guess this says a lot about how far we went in terms of security. It’s a whole new world we live in now but I’m glad I had the chance of experiencing the déjà vu moment of building my own kernel again.