fluxcoil wiki

Building kernel 3.6.1 on RHEL6, notes.

yum -y install gcc make

# we first need newer module-init-tools.
# Using the module-init-tools-3.9-20 from rhel6 leads to 'depmod' beeing aborted with 'Killed'.
# For installation of the newer module-init-tools we need glibc-static from optional channel.
rhn_register 
rhn-channel -a -c rhel-x86_64-server-optional-6
yum install glibc-static docbook-utils

# fetch module init tools from https://modules.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
tar xjf module-init-tools-3.12.tar.bz2 
cd module-init-tools-3.12
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/module-init-tools-3.12
make -j4
make install
export PATH=/usr/local/module-init-tools-3.12/sbin/:/usr/local/module-init-tools-3.12/bin/:$PATH
# ..and get /usr/local/module-init-tools-3.12/sbin/depmod beeing used instead of /sbin/depmod

# compile new kernel
cd /usr/src/
tar xjf linux-3.6.1.tar.bz2 
cd linux-3.6.1
cp /boot/config-2.6.32-318.el6.x86_64 .config
make oldconfig
make -j4 bzImage
make -j4 modules
make modules_install
cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-3.6.1

depmod 3.6.1
mkinitrd /boot/initramfs-3.6.1 3.6.1

cat >>/etc/grub.conf<<EOT
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3.6.1
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-3.6.1 ro [...]
        initrd /initramfs-3.6.1
EOT

reboot
# ..and voila.