Building the kernel
Having decided which kernel to base your build on, the next step is to build it.
Getting the source
Let's assume that you have a board that is supported in mainline. You can get the source code through git or by downloading a tarball. Using git is better because you can see the commit history, you can easily see any changes you may make and you can switch between branches and versions. In this example, we are cloning the stable tree and checking out the version tag 4.1.10:
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux $ cd linux $ git checkout v4.1.10
Alternatively, you could download the tarball from https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/linux-4.1.10.tar.xz.
There is a lot of code here. There are over 38,000 files in the 4.1 kernel containing C source code, header files, and assembly code, amounting to a total of over 12.5 million lines of code (as measured by the cloc utility). Nevertheless, it is worth knowing the basic...