16

I have downloaded the newest most stable Linux kernel, 2.6.33.2.

I thought I would test this using VirtualBox. So I create a dynamically sized harddisk of 4 GB. And installed CentOS 5.3 with just the minimum packages.

I setup the make menuconfig with just the default settings.

After that I ran make and got the following error: 

net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o: final close failed: No space left on device
make[2]: *** [net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [net/bluetooth] Error 2
make: *** [net] Error 2

The amount of space I have left is:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      3.3G  3.3G     0 100% /
/dev/hda1              99M   12M   82M  13% /boot
tmpfs                 125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm

My virtual size is 4 GB, but the actual size is 3.5 GB.

$ ls -hl
total 7.5G
-rw-------. 1 root root 3.5G 2010-04-13 14:08 LFS.vdi

How much size should I give when compiling and installing a Linux kernel? Are there any guidelines to follow when doing this? This is my first time, so just experimenting with this.

Peter Mortensen
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ant2009
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5 Answers5

8

On my recent AMD64 build of 4.4.0-57 on Ubuntu 16.04, I needed about 14.5 GB of space for the build outputs.

That seems a a lot and it seems that is mostly transiently needed files (e.g., .o files resulting from compiling a .c file).

BeeOnRope
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3

Refer to this link >> https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2266609

I compiled/made linux kernel 4.0.0-rc1 on my HP Stream 13 (2GB RAM, dual core Intel Celeron N2840) based on the clear instruction on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/GitKernelBuild, and this is my experience:

After the "git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git" the disk in use in the separate kernel directory: 1691 MB

During the make/compile, the disk space in use went up to 15674 MB. So: more than 15GB ...

Total compile time was: 299 minutes, or 5 hours. Quite long, probably caused by my slow CPU and slow disk.

Deeksha Varshney
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2

From Guide,

NOTE: If you do not have lot of disk space in /usr/src then you can unpack the kernel source package on any partition where you have free disk space (like /home). Because kernel compile needs lot of disk space for object files like *.o. For this reason the /usr/src/linux MUST be a soft link pointing to your source directory.

ukanth
  • 10,800
1

An april 2010 linux kernel is about 60MB bzip2 archive, which after unpacking and compiling takes about 400-500MB.

You can check your directory size with du -hs like:

/mnt/storage/linux-2.6.33$ du -hs                               
437M    .
Pro Backup
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Ivan Petrushev
  • 1,719
0

It seems that the size requirement either has increased over the years or is greater for the realtime kernel. My linux-rt-devel directory is ~36GB:

du -sh linux-rt-5.15/
36G     linux-rt-5.15/
sage
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