ketchup
ketchup is a very handy tool used to update or switch between different versions of the Linux kernel source tree. It has the ability to:
Find the latest version of the kernel, download it, and uncompress it.
Update a currently installed version of the kernel source tree to any other version, by patching the tree to the proper version.
Handle the different development and stable branches of the kernel tree, including the
-mm
and-stable
trees.Download any patches or tarballs needed to do the update, if they are not present on the machine already.
Check the GPG signatures of the tarball and patches to verify that it has downloaded a correct file.
ketchup can be found at http://www.selenic.com/ketchup/ and has lots of additional documentation in the wiki at http://www.selenic.com/ketchup/wiki/. .
Here is a set of steps that show how simple it is to use ketchup to download a specific kernel version, and then have it switch the directory to another kernel version with only a minimal number of commands.
To have ketchup download the 2.6.16.24 version of the kernel source tree into a directory, and rename the directory to be the same as the kernel version, enter:
$mkdir foo
$cd foo
$ketchup -r 2.6.16.24
None -> 2.6.16.24 Unpacking linux-2.6.17.tar.bz2 Applying patch-2.6.17.bz2 -R Applying patch-2.6.16.24.bz2 Current directory renamed to /home/gregkh/linux/linux-2.6.16.24
Now, to upgrade this kernel to contain the latest stable kernel version, just enter:
$ ketchup -r 2.6
2.6.16.24 -> ...
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