Archive for the ‘Unix & Linux’ Category
Compiling and Installing a Kernel
The preceding discussion has covered the most important options you’ll encounter in configuring a kernel to use the networking protocols on your network, and the hardware you use to connect a computer to that network. The process of compiling the kernel, however, is another matter, and one that’s not, strictly speaking, a networking task. Nonetheless, [...]
Posted on Jun 23, 2008
Network Hardware Options
The Network Device Support kernel menu contains options related to network hardware. The most important of these options are drivers for specific network cards. The most common types of network cards today are Ethernet devices, but others include traditional local network hardware, long-distance devices, and wireless devices. PC Card devices (for notebook computers) have their [...]
Posted on Jun 23, 2008
Network Protocol Support
The Networking Options kernel menu contains options related to network protocols. You can include or exclude support for entire protocol stacks, and for some (particularly TCP/IP), you can fine-tune the support to optimize the kernel for particular roles, such as router options or packet filtering.
Posted on Jun 23, 2008
Starting Kernel Configuration
To configure compile-time kernel options, you must begin with the kernel source code. All major distributions ship with this, but it may or may not be installed by default. Many distributions make changes to the standard kernel (say, to add new drivers that aren’t yet standard). You may prefer to start with a standard kernel [...]
Posted on Jun 23, 2008
Linux Kernel Network Configuration
“All roads lead to Rome,” the saying goes. Something similar is true of Linux networking, except that in this case, Rome is the Linux kernel. Sooner or later, all network traffic passes through the kernel. Given that not all computers or networks are identical, the Linux kernel includes several options you can set to optimize [...]
Posted on Jun 23, 2008
