cogs
upgrading Fedora 12 to Linux 4.9
You thought that was the last you'd see of the Fedora 12 install, didn't you? Nope!
This is likely going to be a very long running project for me. After all, I put so
much effort into installing the thing that not upgrading it to be somewhat usable
in 2022 would be a sin.
I was trying to compile some web browsers, but it turns out the OpenSSL version that
Fedora 12 ships with doesn't even have chacha20, a security algorithm
almost everything uses nowadays (I think, at least...) Anyhow, I ran into an issue:
my glibc is too old to actually do anything in regards to compiling more recent
software. And, in most instances, to upgrade glibc, you have to upgrade Linux.
I started this rather tedious process by downloading the Linux source code. I ran
make menuconfig, waited a few seconds, and began filling out the numerous fields
it wants to know about. Finally, I hit enter, and began attempting to just make.
UNFORTUNATELY, nothing is ever that easy, and it complained that my compiler was...
"non-retpoline"? It then told me to upgrade. So, I went out and fetched GCC 5.1's
source code, spent all night compiling that, and came back, to the exact same error.
I found out there's a flag you can set in the Linux kernel configuration which allows
you to compile with a non-retpoline compiler (whatever that means..) which comes at
the cost of disabling Spectre mitigations. I decided I was going to compile everything
myself, anyways, so I really didn't care and began compiling away.
Around 69 minutes later, compile was done and successful. I installed modules, but
it failed at creating the initramfs. Thank GOD it still got the vmlinuz, though -
I literally just copied 2.6's initramfs and rebooted, and lo and behold: Linux 4.9
running on a distro that died in 2010!
We sure do live in interesting times...