Building the kernel

Having decided which kernel to base your build on, the next step is to build it.

Getting the source

All three of the targets used in this book, the Raspberry Pi 4, BeagleBone Black, and the ARM Versatile PB, are well supported by the mainline kernel. Therefore, it makes sense to use the latest long-term kernel available from https://www.kernel.org/, which at the time of writing was 5.4.50. When you come to do this for yourself, you should check to see if there is a later version of the 5.4 kernel and use that instead since it will have fixes for bugs found after 5.4.50 was released.

Important note

If there is a later long-term release, you may want to consider using that one, but be aware that there may have been changes that mean that the following sequence of commands does not work exactly as given.

To fetch and extract a release tarball of the 5.4.50 Linux kernel, use the following:

$ wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5...