[Linux] 2.4 Kernel and Highmem

[Kwan Lowe]

> Actually... the application is having issues because it is running out
> of memory... Poorly written app because it just segfaults/pagefaults and
> dies to a prompt.

It'll be a band-aid, but how about using a watcher script to restart the app if it
fails or grows too large?

> It looks like the only modification they made to the kernel was the
> addition of the SCO Binaries aka
>
> http://linux-abi.sourceforge.net/patches/linux-abi-2.4.28-1a.txt.bz2

Ahh... so this was probably a SCO app at one time and forced to work under Linux.

> I understand how to download a vanilla 2.4.28 kernel, and compile it, but how
> exactly do I compile this kernel with the patch?  I am assuming that the kernel
> source I will need is:
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.28.tar.bz2

If you can find the SCO patches (which may or may not be difficult -- there's lots
of noise on my quick Google search) then patching is not too tough but can be
tedious.. Find the kernel version that the patch was built for, apply the patch. If
highmem is not available in that kernel version, start applying kernel patches that
includes it.  The general idea is to locate the patches that apply to highmem and
include only those in the updates.  If you try to bring in all the patches then
you'll (very) likely end up with conflicts. Again, it's tedious but doable.

Google on "Linux Kernel rebuild" and there's a few documents on RH8 rebuild..

Keep in mind that if you're current kernel is based on RH8, it's generally easier to
find the final RH8 update kernel and patch that instead of the vanilla kernel. Look
to the fedoralegacy site for more recent kernels (though recent means around 2004).

> Also, they do have a vendor.config file in the kernel source directory,
> I am assuming that I will need to use this somehow...

Yes, you can use this to jumpstart your build by replacing the existing config file.
This is with the "make oldconfig" option on the 2.4 series kernels.

> Thanks for everyones help/feedback


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