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.
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.