Compiling the Linux kernel, how much size is needed?

I have downloaded the newest most stable Linux kernel, 2.6.33.2.

I thought I would test this using VirtualBox. So I create a dynamically sized harddisk of 4 GB. And installed CentOS 5.3 with just the minimum packages.

I setup the make menuconfig with just the default settings.

After that I ran make and got the following error:

net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o: final close failed: No space left on device
make[2]: *** [net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [net/bluetooth] Error 2
make: *** [net] Error 2

The amount of space I have left is:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      3.3G  3.3G     0 100% /
/dev/hda1              99M   12M   82M  13% /boot
tmpfs                 125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm

My virtual size is 4 GB, but the actual size is 3.5 GB.

$ ls -hl
total 7.5G
-rw-------. 1 root root 3.5G 2010-04-13 14:08 LFS.vdi

How much size should I give when compiling and installing a Linux kernel? Are there any guidelines to follow when doing this? This is my first time, so just experimenting with this.

ant2009

Posted 2010-04-13T07:22:15.920

Reputation: 2 595

Answers

An april 2010 linux kernel is about 60MB bzip2 archive, which after unpacking and compiling takes about 400-500MB.

You can check your directory size with du -hs like:

/mnt/storage/linux-2.6.33$ du -hs                               
437M    .

Ivan Petrushev

Posted 2010-04-13T07:22:15.920

Reputation: 1 591

1Hello, if that is the case then why is all my disk space being used up. I have allocated a 4gb harddisk and only installed CentOS with only the development tools and libraries. Shouldn't take up that much disk space. When I installed CentSO I just setup 1 partition for root and nothing else. Any problem with that? – ant2009 – 2010-04-13T10:40:54.910

You can investigate what is eating your space with du -h --max-depth=1 run in your root directory (/). Take the biggest directory, go into it, repeat. Do this untill you find your disk hogs. – Ivan Petrushev – 2010-04-15T05:40:44.870

1To list files in current dir sorted by size use ls -lhS, and to see top 10 biggest file in the current dir use ls -lhS|head -10. – Ivan Petrushev – 2010-04-15T05:41:39.063

4The problem is with the space being used while compiling, not unpacking, methinks. – Nikana Reklawyks – 2013-06-29T07:52:36.563

Confirming, most space is used while compiling. – lethalman – 2013-09-20T12:59:49.603

On my recent AMD64 build of 4.4.0-57 on Ubuntu 16.04, I needed about 14.5 GB of space for the build outputs.

That seems a a lot and it seems that is mostly transiently needed files (e.g., .o files resulting from compiling a .c file).

BeeOnRope

Posted 2010-04-13T07:22:15.920

Reputation: 744

Refer to this link >> https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2266609

I compiled/made linux kernel 4.0.0-rc1 on my HP Stream 13 (2GB RAM, dual core Intel Celeron N2840) based on the clear instruction on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/GitKernelBuild, and this is my experience:

After the "git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git" the disk in use in the separate kernel directory: 1691 MB

During the make/compile, the disk space in use went up to 15674 MB. So: more than 15GB ...

Total compile time was: 299 minutes, or 5 hours. Quite long, probably caused by my slow CPU and slow disk.

Deeksha Varshney

Posted 2010-04-13T07:22:15.920

Reputation: 31

Git is entirely different beast. You’d usually download a snapshot. The git respository contains the entire history of Kernel development. Also, compiling will never take that long when irrelevant options are deselected. – Daniel B – 2016-10-15T12:18:07.487

From Guide,

NOTE: If you do not have lot of disk space in /usr/src then you can unpack the kernel source package on any partition where you have free disk space (like /home). Because kernel compile needs lot of disk space for object files like *.o. For this reason the /usr/src/linux MUST be a soft link pointing to your source directory.

ukanth

Posted 2010-04-13T07:22:15.920

Reputation: 9 930

This answer also lacks the amount of free disk space (in GB) that is required to compile the kernel: 1.7GB neither 5.4GB aren't enough for building an amd64-3.11.0 kernel on Ubuntu 13.10. – Pro Backup – 2014-03-12T14:01:37.247