In our kernel build walk-through in this book, we built a Linux kernel on a certain system (here, it was an x86_64 guest) and booted the newly built kernel off the very same system. What if this isn't the case, as will often happen when you are building a kernel for another site or customer premises? While it's always possible to manually put the pieces in place on the remote system, there's a far easier and more correct way to do it – build the kernel and associated meta-work bundled along with it (the initrd image, the kernel modules collection, the kernel headers, and so on) into a well-known package format (Debian's deb, Red Hat's rpm, and so on)! A quick help command on the kernel's top-level Makefile reveals these package targets:
$ make help
[ ... ]
Kernel packaging:
rpm-pkg - Build both source and binary RPM kernel packages
binrpm-pkg - Build only the binary kernel RPM package
deb-pkg - Build both source...
