Following the Arch wiki, I built a custom kernel for the first time ever. It was easier that I thought it’d be, probably because the Arch wiki is so thorough and because I didn’t make that many changes… I just enabled a few FireWire related options as per this guide in order to work on this project (or this).
Results/takeaways
- The OS ran fine with the new kernel 💃
- I learned how to manually create GRUB entries 🔧
- I learned that I don’t even have to create new GRUB entries, since I can simply point to the new kernel image and initramfs from the bootloader menu 🪛
- I learned that my 5800X3D runs well (compiles the new kernel blazingly fast) with all cores set to negative 30 in the UEFI
- FireWire is dead 💀
Tiny followup on that project
That old GPU did something to the UEFI (possibly CMOS?), because even after removing all potentially incompatible hardware and reinstalling my modern GPU, I still got that same error message, saying that the system was forces to boot in CSM mode. Only by resetting the UEFI settings was I able to restore the system to a working state. I admit, I panicked.
Congrats!
Compiling your own kernel is very intimidating at the beginning and one learns a lot after plunging down that rabbit hole
After some time it gets pretty straightforward. Just don’t forget to enable the modules for your drive and filesystem (it has been a while, maybe that’s not needed anymore) and the rest you can always fix with another compilation
That part where you got stuck even after switching hardware: yikes. I wouldn’t expect that
Congrats!.. now do the whole system. 😁
gentoo taught me how to recompile and it feels like arch takes that thunder sometimes. lol
In times of pre-optimized repos (like CachyOS) it seems rather redundant from a performance perspective. Other reasons remain valid though (learning or specialized optimizations or requirements).
Alternatively, it can also be considered wasteful (electricity/compute) when everyone compiles their whole system instead of doing it once in a central server.
I’m playing with the idea of maybe compiling a custom kernel at some point, but it would mainly be to trim out stuff i don’t need to speed up compile time (i’m using gnu guix, and a few months ago the nonguix substitute servers were down for multiple weeks, causing me to have to compile the kernel myself everytime it got updated). I have a 5800X3D as well and it doesn’t take too long, about half an hour i think, but i still think it’s annoying if you have to do it regularly. On my laptop it takes like 1.5 hours lol. I’m not sure if it’s worth bothering with though, cause i’m also in the process of creating a guix config for my server and then setting up the server so that i can offload builds to it for my other systems (it uses a 3900x).
Btw for how long have you had your 5800X3D? I think i’ve had it since 2021 or something like that, but i think the silicon is starting to degrade a little, cause this whole time i’ve also been running it with negative 30 offset, but i’ve been experiencing hard reboots these past months with errors in the logs indicating cpu-related errors. I’ve put the offset back on auto and it seems to be working fine so far, so i think it just might need a little more power to be stable.
We’re opposites. I prefer the libre kernel and it’s not in the repo for the OS I’m using. Takes like 12 hours to compile on my 2012 laptop. I just let it run overnight when there’s an update. Been itching to throw guix on this and check it out.
Oof, yeah that sucks. Now that i think about it i feel like a lot of distros that aren’t libre focused don’t bother with the libre kernel. If i could use the libre kernel i definitely would, but i really need firmware for my gpu and i think that’s the main issue. Wifi is also an issue but if that was the only thing stopping me it would probably be easier to find a solution for that with a dongle or something, but i can’t see myself getting rid of the gpu issue.
