468. Kernel 3.10 on Debian

NOTE I: As of 3.10.2 the nvidia module will still not build.  I've also tried 3.10.5 and it also does not work.

NOTE II: I'm getting random slowdowns on my SL410 laptop with intel graphics. Not sure if it's the same issue as this: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/368-slow-mouse-and-keyboard-triggered.html
Once kworker shows up in top everything grinds to a slow crawl. I also notice that I never used 3.9 on that laptop, so the issue may be present there too.

There are several ways of building a kernel. The easiest (a purely subjective statement) is to use kernel-package i.e. make-kpkg. However, every now and again I see people writing that it's been deprecated.

Either way, start by doing

sudo apt-get install fakeroot build-essential ncurses-dev
mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/linux-3.10.tar.xz
tar xvf linux-3.10.tar.xz
cd linux-3.10/
cat /boot/config-`uname -r`>.config
make oldconfig

Timer tick handling
  1. Periodic timer ticks (constant rate, no dynticks) (HZ_PERIODIC) (NEW)
> 2. Idle dynticks system (tickless idle) (NO_HZ_IDLE) (NEW)
  3. Full dynticks system (tickless) (NO_HZ_FULL) (NEW)
choice[1-3]: 
Memory placement aware NUMA scheduler (NUMA_BALANCING) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Simple CPU accounting cgroup subsystem (CGROUP_CPUACCT) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Group CPU scheduler (CGROUP_SCHED) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Automatic process group scheduling (SCHED_AUTOGROUP) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Choose SLAB allocator
  1. SLAB (SLAB) (NEW)
> 2. SLUB (Unqueued Allocator) (SLUB)
choice[1-2?]:
Linux guest support (HYPERVISOR_GUEST) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Timer frequency
  1. 100 HZ (HZ_100)
  2. 250 HZ (HZ_250) (NEW)
  3. 300 HZ (HZ_300)
> 4. 1000 HZ (HZ_1000)
choice[1-4?]:
Memory Hotplug (ACPI_HOTPLUG_MEMORY) [N/y/?] (NEW) 
AMD frequency sensitivity feedback powersave bias (X86_AMD_FREQ_SENSITIVITY) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Kernel support for scripts starting with #! (BINFMT_SCRIPT) [Y/n/m/?] (NEW)
InfiniBand media type support (TIPC_MEDIA_IB) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Network Coding (BATMAN_ADV_NC) [N/y/?] (NEW)
NETLINK: mmaped IO (NETLINK_MMAP) [N/y/?] (NEW)
NETLINK: socket monitoring interface (NETLINK_DIAG) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Dummy IRQ handler (DUMMY_IRQ) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Generic on-chip SRAM driver (SRAM) [N/y/?] (NEW)
ME Enabled Intel Chipsets (INTEL_MEI_ME) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Block device as cache (BCACHE) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Qualcomm Atheros AR816x/AR817x support (ALX) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
QLOGIC QLCNIC 83XX family SR-IOV Support (QLCNIC_SRIOV) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
Realtek RTL8152 Based USB 2.0 Ethernet Adapters (USB_RTL8152) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Atheros ath9k rate control (ATH9K_LEGACY_RATE_CONTROL) [N/y/?] (NEW)
rt2800usb - Include support for rt55xx devices (EXPERIMENTAL) (RT2800USB_RT55XX) [N/y/?] (NEW) y
 Realtek RTL8188EE Wireless Network Adapter (RTL8188EE) [N/m/?] (NEW)
IMS Passenger Control Unit driver (INPUT_IMS_PCU) [N/m/?] (NEW) 
Qualcomm Single-wire Serial Bus Interface (SSBI) (SSBI) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Analog Devices ADT7310/ADT7320 (SENSORS_ADT7310) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
National Semiconductor LM95234 (SENSORS_LM95234) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Nuvoton NCT6775F and compatibles (SENSORS_NCT6775) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
generic cpu cooling support (CPU_THERMAL) [N/y/?] (NEW) y
ChromeOS Embedded Controller (MFD_CROS_EC) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Silicon Laboratories 4761/64/68 AM/FM radio. (MFD_SI476X_CORE) [N/m/?] (NEW) 
System Controller Register R/W Based on Regmap (MFD_SYSCON) [N/y/?] (NEW)
TI TPS65912 Power Management chip (MFD_TPS65912) [N/y/?] (NEW) 
Conexant cx25821 support (VIDEO_CX25821) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Cypress firmware helper routines (CYPRESS_FIRMWARE) [N/m] (NEW) 
QXL virtual GPU (DRM_QXL) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Apple infrared receiver (HID_APPLEIR) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Enable USB persist by default (USB_DEFAULT_PERSIST) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
USB-Wishbone adapter interface driver (USB_SERIAL_WISHBONE) [N/m/?] (NEW)
USB Physical Layer drivers (USB_PHY) [N/y/?] (NEW)
PXA 27x (USB_PXA27X) [N/m/?] (NEW)
MARVELL PXA2128 USB 3.0 controller (USB_MV_U3D) [N/m/?] (NEW)
LED Support for TI LP5562 LED driver chip (LEDS_LP5562) [N/m/?] (NEW)
LED Camera Flash/Torch Trigger (LEDS_TRIGGER_CAMERA) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) y
iSCSI Extentions for RDMA (iSER) target support (INFINIBAND_ISERT) [N/m/?] (NEW)
Set system time from RTC on startup and resume (RTC_HCTOSYS) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
Set the RTC time based on NTP synchronization (RTC_SYSTOHC) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
RTC used to set the system time (RTC_HCTOSYS_DEVICE) [rtc0] (NEW)
 WIS GO7007 MPEG encoder support (VIDEO_GO7007) [N/m/?] (NEW)
DesignWare USB2 DRD Core Support (USB_DWC2) [N/m/?] (NEW)
pvpanic device support (PVPANIC) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Reset Controller Support (RESET_CONTROLLER) [N/y/?] (NEW)
XFS Verbose Warnings (XFS_WARN) [N/y/?] (NEW) 
Btrfs will run sanity tests upon loading (BTRFS_FS_RUN_SANITY_TESTS) [N/y/?] (NEW)
 Btrfs debugging support (BTRFS_DEBUG) [N/y/?] (NEW)
EFI Variable filesystem (EFIVAR_FS) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
torture tests for RCU (RCU_TORTURE_TEST) [N/m/y/?] (NEW)
Ring buffer startup self test (RING_BUFFER_STARTUP_TEST) [N/y/?] (NEW)
Test functions located in the string_helpers module at runtime (TEST_STRING_HELPERS) [N/m/y] (NEW)
CMAC support (CRYPTO_CMAC) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) 
SHA256 digest algorithm (SSSE3/AVX/AVX2) (CRYPTO_SHA256_SSSE3) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) y
SHA512 digest algorithm (SSSE3/AVX/AVX2) (CRYPTO_SHA512_SSSE3) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) y
Camellia cipher algorithm (x86_64/AES-NI/AVX2) (CRYPTO_CAMELLIA_AESNI_AVX2_X86_64) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) m
Serpent cipher algorithm (x86_64/AVX2) (CRYPTO_SERPENT_AVX2_X86_64) [N/m/y/?] (NEW) m
KVM legacy PCI device assignment support (KVM_DEVICE_ASSIGNMENT) [Y/n/?] (NEW)
VHOST_SCSI TCM fabric driver (VHOST_SCSI) [N/m/?] (NEW)

make menuconfig

You can now enable any additional modules by navigating the menu structure. Note that most likely you don't have to enable anything in this step, but it can come in handy if there's a major transition (e.g. the way multimedia was handled changed between kernel 3.5 and 3.6) or if you want to enable a previously disabled option.

Then pick either method 1 or 2 below.

If you only want to compile modules that are currently in use (not a good idea if you want to use the same kernel on a range of computers, or have USB devices that aren't currently plugged in) you can do that by using make localmodconfig instead of make oldconfig. I wouldn't recommend it -- in most cases it won't make a faster kernel, and space and memory tends not to be much of in the way of issues these days.

---

Method 1. kernel-package
Below, change -j2 to -jX, where X is the number of cores in your CPU (not cores+1 or anything funny like that. See other posts on this blog for compilation performance tests)

sudo apt-get install kernel-package
make-kpkg clean
time fakeroot make-kpkg -j2 --initrd kernel_image kernel_headers
sudo dpkg -i ../linux-image-3.10.0_3.10.0-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb ../linux-headers-3.10.0_3.10.0-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb

Took 49 minutes on a 3-core AMD Athlon II, and used ca 7 Gb.

The files are shown below:

-rw-r--r--  1 me me 8.4M Jul  1 16:02 linux-headers-3.10.0_3.10.0-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 me me  32M Jul  1 16:00 linux-image-3.10.0_3.10.0-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb

---

Method 2. make deb-pkg

make clean
time make deb-pkg -j2
sudo dpkg -i ../linux-firmware-image_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb ../linux-headers-3.10.0_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb ../linux-libc-dev_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb ../linux-image-3.10.0_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb

It took ca 50 minutes, it used ca 7 Gb, and generated the following files:

-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 1.1M Jul  1 16:58 ../linux-firmware-image_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 9.7M Jul  1 16:58 ../linux-headers-3.10.0_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 458M Jul  1 17:13 ../linux-image-3.10.0_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 920K Jul  1 16:58 ../linux-libc-dev_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb

Note the size of the linux-image-3.10.0_3.10.0-2_amd64.deb package.

---

Difference:
There are a few differences. One method, the kpgk one, is supposedly 'deprecated', but it's been working fine in the past and will work fine in the future (at least for some time).

The make dev-pkg method also generates a much bigger image file -- by a factor of 15 or so.

Otherwise, the chief difference, from what I can see, is if you want to uninstall the kernel. Remove the libc-dev package requires you to downgrade the package using apt-get, by specifying a version e.g.

apt-cache policy linux-libc-dev

linux-libc-dev:
  Installed: 3.10.0-1
  Candidate: 3.10.0-1
  Version table:
 *** 3.10.0-1 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.9.6-1~bpo70+1 0
        100 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy-backports/main amd64 Packages
        100 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports/main amd64 Packages
     3.2.46-1 0
        500 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages
     3.2.41-2+deb7u2 0
        500 http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates/main amd64 Packages

sudo apt-get install linux-libc-dev=3.9.6-1~bpo70+1

I personally prefer the kernel-package approach.