I followed your instructions but I could not find the file Module.symvers. In my /usr/src directory , I only see redhat directory , no kernels directory.
# ls /usr/src/
redhat

Can you tell how I you get /usr/src/kernels?
Thanks
Anh

Then you load the module with modprobe exactly as you have written.

I believe that you should address your questions regarding commercial software to their support channels or to a professional consultant.

Thanks a lot I just installed kernel headers as per your script for RHEL4 for the kernel 2.6.9-11.EL.

Can you tell me how to load the thirdparty drivers generally.

example: I loaded ncipher server software after installing the headers it installed their drivers as nfp.
lsmod shows the entry for new driver as nfp

if i will try to add the module as modprobe nfp , I got the error as ” FATAL: Module nfp not found “.

Any idea to fix this ?

Thanks in advance
Kris

Kris

This is Kris from Austin,TX.

I am new to Linux, installed RHEL 3.0 on DELL 2550 and upgrded the kernel to 2.4.21-37ELsmp.

Now I am trying to install the ncipher software which needs kernel headers for the above said kernel 2.4.21-37ELsmp.

I tried your kernel header script to get the headers to install ncipher software. I couldn’t get Module.symvers file in the location you mentioned or Kernel-devlop rpm pkg in the source CD.

RHEL 3.0 by default didn’t install any kernel headers .

Appreciate if you let me know how to solve this issue.

Thanks,
Kris

Generally, it should be safe to delete the C source *.c and the intermediate build products, for example the *.o files. Only the headers (.h files) are needed in order to compile 3rd party modules. Taking a closer look at the contents of the official fedora kernel-devel package, the needed files seem to be:
- *.h
- Makefile*
- Kconfig*
- the /scripts directory

The following command:

# find /usr/src/kernels/2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-i686 -type f ! -name *.h ! -name Makefile* ! -name Kconfig* | grep -v 'FC4-i686/scripts'

shows that the kernel-devel package, apart from the files mentioned above, also contains the following:

/usr/src/kernels/2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-i686/.config
/usr/src/kernels/2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-i686/include/config/MARKER
/usr/src/kernels/2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-i686/Module.symvers
/usr/src/kernels/2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-i686/arch/i386/kernel/asm-offsets.s

This means, that if I erase all other files from my kernel sources directory, except for all those mentioned above, I would still have the complete kernel headers and 3rd party modules should compile properly.

So I wrote a simple script to erase all other files:

[UPDATE]: WordPress had removed the backslashes from the following script. This is fixed.

#! /bin/bash
#edit - WITHOUT TRAILING SLASH
KERNSRC="/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-i686-full-testing"
find "$KERNSRC" -type f \
	! -name *.h \
	! -name Makefile* \
	! -name Kconfig* \
	! -name *.symvers \
	! -name MARKER \
	! -name .config \
	! -name asm-offsets.s \
	| grep -v "$KERNSRC/scripts" \
	| xargs rm -f
exit 0

The occupied space was reduced to around 100MB. Only regular files were deleted though, the directories remained. I could further reduce the occupied space by deleting:
- all irrelevant asm directories in include/. The needed ones are include/asm-generic, include/asm-i386 (depends on the architecture) and the asm symlink.
- probably all directories under arch/, which are irrelevant to the architecture. I kept the arch/i386.
- the documentation

All the above, are based on the fedora kernel SRPM.

Vikram, please consider all these as a hackish-like method to reduce the occupied space. Maybe this is a completely wrong approach. Anyway, after keeping only these files, I could compile the lirc_gpio and the truecrypt kernel modules without the singlest of problems.

Furthermore, instead of all those actions, you could try doing a:
NOTE: Keep a copy of the Module.symvers file.

# make clean

and then perform the extra step I describe in the above article:

# make prepare
# make scripts

This way, you would get rid of the kernel compilation products which take a lot of space, but still have a usable set of kernel headers.

I hope these give you some helpful hints to investigate the issue yourself. Thanks for your comment. Very interesting indeed.

It’s a very comprehensive and usefull way of making kernel headers available for a user. I normally download the kernel from kernel.org and compile a customised lean kernel for my machine. The problem which I face is that if I have to compile a third party module, say for vmware for my running customised kernel then I have to keep the whole compiled kernel image which amounts to nearly 1.5G whereas kernel-devel package installs only around 75Mb. Even if we keep all the headers then I think it should not go beyond 100Mb.

So, I ask you, if you can post some pointers where one can delete the unneccessary files and make available kernel headers from the compiled kernel tree.