290. Compiling Kernel 3.7.* on Debian (Wheezy/testing)

Update 19/12/2012
On one of my seven boxes I'm having problems with the new kernel, receiving messages such as

pci_pcm_runtime_suspend()
azx_runtime_suspend
[snd_hda_intel] returns -11

This is a known bug (https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/1865521/), but as can be seen in that message the patch might not be included until kernel 3.8 (although one of the authors call for a backport to kernel 3.6). Again, this happened only on one out of seven computers tested so far so it might not be a universal problem. See here for how to fix it yourself: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/patching-kernel-371-to-fix.html

Note
 vboxdrv 4.1.18 and nvidia 304.48-1 dkms packages do not seem to play well with 3.7. This is perhaps not that surprising given that wheezy is frozen since June 2012.

* The virtualbox-dkms/vboxdrv (4.1.18-dfsg-1.1) isn't playing ball on 3.7. See e.g. https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=53031 and http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?61234-Kernel-update-video-drivers-and-virtualbox

I solved it by going to the virtualbox website and installing their .deb package:

wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.4/virtualbox-4.2_4.2.4-81684~Debian~wheezy_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get autoremove virtualbox virtualbox-qt virtualbox-dkms
sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-4.2_4.2.4-81684~Debian~wheezy_amd64.deb
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

This works absolutely fine under 3.7 and 3.7.1

* I'm also having issues with building the nvidia dkms module on this kernel. It seems to be a bug which is resolved by upgrading to a newer nvidia driver. http://www.mail-archive.com/desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net/msg184146.html

Given that Wheezy is frozen since the end of June I suspect that we won't be seeing any fix for this. Instead I ended up installing nvidia-current (310.19) using smxi (smxi.org) and it's working fine (the alt+prtscrn screenshot bug doesn't seem to be resolved though).

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Original post:
Be aware that starting with kernel 3.6 you will need to explicitly include compilation of various drivers for multimedia and webcams -- see e.g.
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/compiling-kernel-36-on-debian.html
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/leadtek-dtv-1000s-in-kernel-36-debian.html

Other than that, compiling kernel 3.7.* is pretty straightforward. The ncurses packages are needed only for 'make menuconfig'

sudo apt-get install kernel-package fakeroot build-essential ncurses-bin ncurses-dev

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.7.1.tar.bz2
tar xvf linux-3.7.1.tar.bz2

cd linux-3.7.1/
cat /boot/config-`uname -r`>.config
make oldconfig

and answer the questions (see bottom of the post for a list of new features).

If you want to specifically include a driver, then the easiest thing to do is:

make menuconfig

and navigating through (or search -- hit / ). E.g. saa7134 is found under Device drivers/Multimedia support/Media PCI adapters/Philips SAA7134 support. Don't forget to compile in remote control support as well if needed.

Continue (replace 4 with whatever is suitable for the number of cores on your system):

make-kpkg clean
time fakeroot make-kpkg -j4 --initrd --revision=3.7.1 --append-to-version=-amd64 kernel_image kernel_headers

This took 20 minutes on a four-core i5-2400..

mv ../linux*3.7*.deb .
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Building failed completely on an AMD 8150FX 8 core system (See bottom of the post). It built fine on first try on all other systems.

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Changes (if in doubt, hit enter for the default option):

* CPU/Task time and stats accounting
*
Cputime accounting
> 1. Simple tick based cputime accounting (TICK_CPU_ACCOUNTING) (NEW)
  2. Fine granularity task level IRQ time accounting (IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING)
choice[1-2]: 1
Consider userspace as in RCU extended quiescent state (RCU_USER_QS) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Module signature verification (MODULE_SIG) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Legacy cpb sysfs knob support for AMD CPUs (X86_ACPI_CPUFREQ_CPB) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
Packet: sockets monitoring interface (PACKET_DIAG) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
IPv6: GRE tunnel (IPV6_GRE) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) 
IPv4 NAT (NF_NAT_IPV4) [N/m/?] (NEW)
IPv6 NAT (NF_NAT_IPV6) [N/m/?] (NEW)
OMAP OCP2SCP DRIVER (OMAP_OCP2SCP) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) 
 Maximum expected bad eraseblock count per 1024 eraseblocks (MTD_UBI_BEB_LIMIT) [20] (NEW)
UBI Fastmap (Experimental feature) (MTD_UBI_FASTMAP) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Calxeda Highbank SATA support (SATA_HIGHBANK) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) (VXLAN) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) 
PCH PTP clock support (PCH_PTP) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Solarflare SFC9000-family PTP support (SFC_PTP) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
Drivers for Atheros AT803X PHYs (AT803X_PHY) [N/m/?] (NEW)
MAX310X support (SERIAL_MAX310X) [N/y/?] (NEW)
SCCNXP serial port support (SERIAL_SCCNXP) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
TPM HW Random Number Generator support (HW_RANDOM_TPM) [M/n/?] (NEW)
TPM Interface Specification 1.2 Interface (I2C - Infineon) (TCG_TIS_I2C_INFINEON) [N/m/?] (NEW)
NXP SC18IS602/602B/603 I2C to SPI bridge (SPI_SC18IS602) [N/m/?] (NEW)
OMAP HDQ driver (HDQ_MASTER_OMAP) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Analog Devices ADT7410 (SENSORS_ADT7410) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Maxim MAX197 and compatibles (SENSORS_MAX197) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
generic cpu cooling support (CPU_THERMAL) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Fairchild FAN53555 Regulator (REGULATOR_FAN53555) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Media USB Adapters (MEDIA_USB_SUPPORT) [N/y/?] (NEW) 
STK1160 USB video capture support (VIDEO_STK1160) [N/m/?] (NEW)
STK1160 AC97 codec support (VIDEO_STK1160_AC97) [N/y/?] (NEW)   
Enable debug for the B2C2 FlexCop drivers (DVB_B2C2_FLEXCOP_USB_DEBUG) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Media PCI Adapters (MEDIA_PCI_SUPPORT) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Enable debug for the B2C2 FlexCop drivers (DVB_B2C2_FLEXCOP_PCI_DEBUG) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Media test drivers (V4L_TEST_DRIVERS) [N/y] (NEW)
ISA and parallel port devices (MEDIA_PARPORT_SUPPORT) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Autoselect tuners and i2c modules to build (MEDIA_SUBDRV_AUTOSELECT) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
Maximum debug level (NOUVEAU_DEBUG) [5] (NEW)
Default debug level (NOUVEAU_DEBUG_DEFAULT) [3] (NEW)
Backlight Driver for LM3630 (BACKLIGHT_LM3630) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Backlight Driver for LM3639 (BACKLIGHT_LM3639) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Sony PS3 BD Remote Control (HID_PS3REMOTE) [N/m/?] (NEW)
HID Sensors framework support (HID_SENSOR_HUB) [N/m/?] (NEW)
ZTE USB serial driver (USB_SERIAL_ZTE) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Functions for loading firmware on EZUSB chips (USB_EZUSB_FX2) [M/y/?] (NEW)
LED support for LM3642 Chip (LEDS_LM3642) [N/m/?] (NEW)
LED support for LM355x Chips, LM3554 and LM3556 (LEDS_LM355x) [N/m/?] (NEW)
LED CPU Trigger (LEDS_TRIGGER_CPU) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Dallas DS2404 (RTC_DRV_DS2404) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Silicom devices (NET_VENDOR_SILICOM) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
Silicom BypassCTL library support (SBYPASS) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Silicom BypassCTL net support (BPCTL) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Cambridge Electronic Design 1401 USB support (CED1401) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Digi Realport driver (DGRP) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) *
STE-Modem remoteproc support (STE_MODEM_RPROC) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
SMB2 network file system support (EXPERIMENTAL) (CIFS_SMB2) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Red-Black tree test (RBTREE_TEST) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Interval tree test (INTERVAL_TREE_TEST) [N/m/?] (NEW)
CAST5 (CAST-128) cipher algorithm (x86_64/AVX) (CRYPTO_CAST5_AVX_X86_64) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
CAST6 (CAST-256) cipher algorithm (x86_64/AVX) (CRYPTO_CAST6_AVX_X86_64) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Asymmetric (public-key cryptographic) key type (ASYMMETRIC_KEY_TYPE) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Asymmetric public-key crypto algorithm subtype (ASYMMETRIC_PUBLIC_KEY_SUBTYPE) [N/m/?] (NEW)
RSA public-key algorithm (PUBLIC_KEY_ALGO_RSA) [N/m/?] (NEW)
X.509 certificate parser (X509_CERTIFICATE_PARSER) [N/m/?] (NEW)

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AMD FX 8150
My AMD FX8150 is causing no end of problems when it comes to compiling the kernel e.g.

In file included from include/linux/dynamic_debug.h:100:0,
                 from include/linux/kernel.h:14,
                 from include/linux/sched.h:15,
                 from include/linux/blkdev.h:4,
                 from drivers/scsi/lpfc/lpfc_sli.c:22:
include/linux/string.h:23:1: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See  /usr/share/doc/gcc-4.7/README.Bugs for instructions.
  CC [M]  drivers/scsi/lpfc/lpfc_ct.o
[..]
  LD [M]  drivers/scsi/osd/osd.o
  CC [M]  drivers/scsi/mpt2sas/mpt2sas_ctl.o
The bug is not reproducible, so it is likely a hardware or OS problem.
make[4]: *** [drivers/scsi/lpfc/lpfc_sli.o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [drivers/scsi/lpfc] Error 2
make[3]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....