Building kernel from source for the Acer Aspire S3 951

gompie-nr3
  9 years ago
  1

THIS "TUTORIAL" IS ABOUT BUILDING A KERNEL FOR THE  ACER ASPIRE S3 951. PLEASE BE CAREFUL AND PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. PLEASE ALSO LOOK AT THE LIQUORIX KERNELS IF PERFORMANCE IS YOUR GOAL. http://liquorix.net/ THEY IMPROVE ENDURANCE AS WELL.

Anyhow, building my own kernel helped me get 4,5 hour endurance on battery power and full performance when needed. My only intention with this tutorial is to provide it to fellow owners, but please be careful. Reading some of the posts by owners having difficulty to get this fine handsome machine working properly, brought me to the idea of sharing what worked for me. No more,, no less.

By experiencing difficulties of getting the best out of my Acer Aspire S3 951 with Mint installed, I followed the instructions found on http://www.linlap.com/acer_aspire_s3, including the BIOS update; by far the most scary part I must say..PLEASE BE MOST CAUTIOUS WITH THAT

The "powertop" tool helps a lot too, you can find it in the Mint repositories. no risk there.

First start by reading more instructions for building a kernel on Debian, For instance here: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch08s06.html.en and install the mandatory packages. Checkout /usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.gz for extra info.

Assuming GRUB is installed on your system. Please check. You can also use this script https://www.dropbox.com/s/il6hbs6n58r0c86/bootinfoscript-061.tar.gz . Also checkout http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html . I use following line in /etc/default/grub . Without it your kernel probably won't bring the wanted performance and some features don't even work!


GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.enable_ppgtt=2 i915.modeset=1 i915.enable_rc6=7 i915.enable_fbc=1 i915.semaphores=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 acpi_osi=linux acpi_backlight=vendor elevator=noop ath9k.ps_enable=1 selinux=0"

Get the source from
https://www.kernel.org/ (3.15.5 at the moment of writing) and unpack in a directory of choice and cd to that directory. [directory of choice]/linux-3.15.5 in this case.

To start with a working configuration for the Acer Aspire S3 951, use the first time my latest configuration. You can get it following this link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fcv638u6egi2bc9/config-3.15.5-aspire-s3-951 and save it as .config  (Be careful to get the file name right: 7 characters, the first being a "dot") . Later on when building your next kernel, you can automatically use the one from your previous installed kernel.

Open a terminal and make sure you are in the right directory; [directory of choice]/linux-3.15.5 in this case. check if the .config file is saved in this directory by using for instance cat .config

Fore all options and help you type make help 

To update this potentially old configuration with new/changed/removed options I would use make oldconfig , it will ask for your input on new options if there are any. 

Use make xconfig or make menuconfig if you want/need to change something, but be very careful!!

Clean the source tree and reset the kernel-package parameters. To do that, do make-kpkg clean

Then use fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-aspire-s3-951 kernel_image kernel_headers to build the two .deb files that end up in the [directory-of-choice]. You can also execute the the command as root if you ran into problems with using fakeroot.. Thus as root : make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-aspire-s3-951 kernel_image kernel_headers

You can install the kernel packages by dpkg -i ../linux*3.15.5-aspire-s3-951*deb as root (check version of course)

Good luck!


 

Comments
MagicMint 9 years ago

I was happy with the standard install — that was the reason why I bought my machine. So I could avoid all this. But nevertheless, it’s a nice work of yours!


jahid_0903014 9 years ago

Promoted, now..


Hammer459 9 years ago

Now this is a much better Tutorial with due warnings and explanations as to the benefits etc.
Good job @gompie-nr3


gompie-nr3 9 years ago

First of all.. Thanks for all the comments!! As always; comments can only inspire you to make things better. . Reading your comments made me realize there was a lot missing and I hope to have succeeded in improving.

I still don't pretend to be an expert though. But I'm a linux fan since the mid nineties and an Open Source adapt pur sang. By experiencing difficulties of getting the best out of my Acer Aspire S3 951 with Mint installed, I followed the instructions found on http://www.linlap.com/acer_aspire_s3, including the BIOS update; by far the most scary part I must say.. Anyhow; there's where most of the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" comes from. After using the Ubuntu kernel for a while, I started building a kernel by myself to get even more endurance and better hardware support. After intel_pstate was introduced to the kernel things worked even better. The "powertop" tool helpes a lot too. Reading some of the posts by owners having difficulty to get this fine handsome machine working properly, brought me to the idea of sharing what worked for me. No more,, no less.


Hammer459 9 years ago

Also... posting a tutorial on building the kernel of the OS, expert stuff if any ever is, while stating that you are not an expert is not very well thought through.
"kernel.org" has better description on how to build kernels for most machines


Hammer459 9 years ago

You should pretty much never edit the config file, especially if you need to read a tutorial to do it. Mess this up and reinstal your box...
The "make menu-config" does this way better.
Thus this is not a tutorial, it is the opposite.


AshutoshKale 9 years ago

Please Post when You are 101% sure It about it ... it may Damage one's kernel and might get kernel panic !!!


remoulder 9 years ago

This is not a tutorial


jahid_0903014 9 years ago

Informative, but there was no need to copy paste the config file contents here. As the begining said "DO NOT EDIT", you shouldn't edit this manually, ins