4.  Cloning of Linux Kernels

You may want to build a Linux kernel on a system and then you may want to mass deploy to many identical hardware PCs. To make it easy to install your newly built kernel on hundreds of other systems, you may want to package it in RPMs (Redhat) or DEB package (Debian) or just tar.gz files.

  1. Build a kernel rpm package with rpmbuild -ba kernel*.spec

  2. Check that the kernel*.rpm generated has all the files in /lib/modules/2.x.x-y directory. Otherwise you may want to tar gzip the directory /lib/modules/2.x.x-y and take it to destination machines.

  3. Check that your kernel package has /boot/initrd-2.x.x-y.img file, otherwise you may want to tar gzip and take it to destination machines.

  4. And other files in /boot which are not in the kernel*.rpm package.