make-kpkg and dirty modules

July 17, 2006 - 1 min read

Dammit, tonight I spent too many hours chasing down a “feature” in the Debian kernel build process or the Linux-2.6 kernel. I haven’t yet deciced who to blame ;-)

Here goes: when you build the latest Linux 2.6 kernel, checked out from the git repository, with make-kpkg you should make sure to uncheck the CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO option in the kernel config before hand. It’s under “General setup” → “Automatically append version information …”. If you don’t disable it, then your utsrelease.h will contain some annoying extra git version string and your modules directory will look something like this: /lib/modules/2.6.18-dirty

All this due to the LOCALVERSION config, your git checkout, and the tiny little fact that make-kpkg modifies (moves away) the two files scripts/packages/{builddeb,Makefile} which leads to the modification of the checkout and the scripts/setlocalversion will tell this to the top Makefile which in turn will create this whole mess.

Take my advice, untick the CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO option. It’s the easiest one to get away with.