Rock's kernel

I've decided it's been enough.

Rock has been running 2.6.12 for ages. Not because I didn't want to upgrade, but since 2.6.12 was the last Debian-packaged kernel that would actually boot on rock. You see, this machine is a rather old SMP system, and there seems to be something wrong with its interrupt system. It would boot if I used a uniprocessor kernel instead, but then it's pretty silly to have a box with two processors, and only use one of them...

At first I ignored it, assuming it would get fixed some time soon. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. And since we're at 2.6.18 right now, and the kernel team has done away with uniprocessor or SMP-only kernels, that means I can't even upgrade to the latest kernel anymore, even if I'd want to.

I've been using git-bisect for the last few days in an attempt to find the issue, so that I can report it... only today I realized that I did remember 2.6.13 not to work, but that perhaps it failed for reasons not related to my current problem. Downloading that package from snapshot.debian.net and verifying showed that this is, indeed, the case. Grmbl.

So I had to start all over again... Not fun.

After starting that, I suddenly found out that make-kpkg didn't want to be friends anymore:

LC_ALL=C make-kpkg --initrd --config oldconfig --rootcmd fakeroot kernel-image
exec debian/rules  DEBIAN_REVISION=2.6.13-10.00.Custom  INITRD=YES  ROOT_CMD=fakeroot  kernel-image 
debian/ruleset/targets/source.mk:34: *** target pattern contains no `%'.  Stop.
wouter@rock:/usr/src/linux-2.6$ 

Hate. Grmbl.