been using Arch for years but i am still a novice, yesterday i had found that in order for something to work on my system i will need to edit a few lines in kernel which i did, then removed unnecessary modules > intel, > nvidia, compiled. it worked great but with Arch and its rolling release i am dreading the next update and having to go through this again.
what methods are there to automate this process?
What modifications were required? The good part of a rolling release is that upstreaming things means you only have to deal with manual fixes for like 2 or 3 updates.
set
LINK_TRAINING_ATTEMPTSfrom5to10in drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/link/link_dpms.c and setLINK_TRAINING_RETRY_DELAYfrom50to100in drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/link/protocols/link_dp_training.c.i doubt this will be added to kernel as its a fix for an issue that isn’t wide spread.
That wouldn’t be accepted as is, but those sound like tunables. They could be exposed as kernel parameters. May be worth submitting the patch as an RFC just to call attention to it.
I followed your advice, Github my edit link_dpms.c, - Github my edit link_dp_training.c how do i submit as RFC. total noob with github lol.
Successful GitHub pulls are rare; more often, patches live like this. You’re better off contacting the maintainer of the subsystem you’re editing. See the official submission guide.
Not to be dejecting!
thank you and no dejection taken. you’re actually very helpful :D
Ah, so the kernel actually uses mailing lists. You need to use the get maintainers Perl script to get the people you need to send the email TO and then send it to them with the dri-devel list CC’d.
thank you i will read up on how to submit this kind of stuff.
Use diff patches and automate with some bash scripting.
You could write a bash script to automate this process. Pacman supports hooks for updates, so after kernel updates you could set it up to automatically run the script.
not looked in to pacman hooks but will need to now lol any i made a script that downloads, unzips and patches then compiles so mostly hands free.
Although I haven’t used Arch for a long time, I guess https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel#Compilation and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel/Arch_build_system will work.
This is the perfect use case for gentoo, there is a documented process for adding kernel patches and saving a kernel build configuration
I use a custom kernel on my laptop. I just modified the PKGBUILD of the official arch kernel package, and added my patch as a file. Then I could build a proper package with makepkg. I’m planning on setting up my server to automatically build the patched kernel and serve it in a private arch repository, so I don’t have to compile the kernel on my laptop regularly. I’m waiting on forgejo (git forge I host on my server) version 9 to be released first, as it should support arch package hosting by then.
this sounds very involved initially but hands off after the fact.
Script
#!/bin/bash cd ~/ || exit LATEST_KERNEL=$(curl -s https://www.kernel.org | grep -Po 'linux-\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.tar\.xz' | head -1) echo "Latest Kernel: $LATEST_KERNEL" KERNEL_URL="https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/$LATEST_KERNEL" echo "Kernel URL: $KERNEL_URL" DIR_NAME=$(echo $LATEST_KERNEL | sed 's/\.tar\.xz//') mkdir -p ./$DIR_NAME wget -O ./$DIR_NAME/$LATEST_KERNEL "$KERNEL_URL" || exit tar -xf ./$DIR_NAME/$LATEST_KERNEL -C ./$DIR_NAME || exit EXTRACTED_DIR=$(tar -tf ./$DIR_NAME/$LATEST_KERNEL | head -1 | cut -f1 -d"/") cd ./$DIR_NAME/$EXTRACTED_DIR || exit zcat /proc/config.gz > .config echo "Kernel config copied." if [ -f "drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/link/link_dpms.c" ] && [ -f "drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/link/protocols/link_dp_training.c" ]; then echo "Files found, proceeding with modifications..." sed -i 's/#define LINK_TRAINING_RETRY_DELAY 50 \/\* ms \*\//#include <linux\/module.h>\nstatic int link_training_retry_delay = 50;\nmodule_param(link_training_retry_delay, int, 0644);\nMODULE_PARM_DESC(link_training_retry_delay, "Delay between link training retries (ms)");\n#define LINK_TRAINING_RETRY_DELAY link_training_retry_delay/' drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/link/protocols/link_dp_training.c sed -i 's/#define LINK_TRAINING_ATTEMPTS 4/#include <linux\/module.h>\nstatic int link_training_attempts = 4;\nmodule_param(link_training_attempts, int, 0644);\nMODULE_PARM_DESC(link_training_attempts, "Number of link training attempts");\n#define LINK_TRAINING_ATTEMPTS link_training_attempts/' drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/link/link_dpms.c else echo "One or both files not found in the kernel source directory." fi echo "Kernel modifications complete." make olddefconfig || exit #make || exit echo "Compiling the kernel..." make -j16 || exit echo "Building modules..." sudo make modules_install || exit echo "Installing the kernel..." sudo make install || exit echo "Backing up existing kernel files..." sudo cp /boot/vmlinuz-linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux.bak sudo cp /boot/initramfs-linux.img /boot/initramfs-linux.img.bak echo "Moving new kernel files to /boot..." sudo cp ./arch/x86/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-fix sudo mkinitcpio -k $(make kernelrelease) -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-fix.img if [ -f /boot/vmlinuz-fix ] && [ -f /boot/initramfs-fix.img ]; then echo "Kernel and initramfs moved to /boot successfully." else echo "Failed to move kernel or initramfs files to /boot." exit 1 fi echo "Kernel compilation, installation, and file replacement completed successfully."
