I’m trying to compartmentalize my Linode server with Docker, and so I’ll need a 3.8+ 64-bit kernel with AUFS support¹. Ok.

My old Linode was 32-bit, but using the Dashboard and the doubled storage Linode just upgraded me to I was able to add a Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Configuration Profile and Disk Image, reboot to that and mount the old disk image to copy files over. So far so good.

The current Linode kernel is a custom 3.9.3. Nice. But without AUFS support, ouch. Ok then, I’ll need to recompile this thing.

Also, lxc-checkconfig tells me that I miss support for a lot of things, so…

NOTE: There are easy tutorials² telling you to use the vendor provided kernels, but I feel like there is a reason if Linode ships his own custom kernel, so I really want to just customize theirs.

Getting the source and putting the config in place

The Linode feature that allows us to load our own module is PV-GRUB and here is the Linode Library article about that, keep it open for reference.

First, have a look at what kernel branch your box is currently running and download the tarball of its source from kernel.org:

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$ uname -a
Linux li593-45 3.9.3-x86_64-linode33 #1 SMP Mon May 20 10:22:57 EDT 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ aria2c https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/linux-3.9.11.tar.xz
[...]
$ tar xvf linux-3.9.11.tar.xz
[...]
$ cd linux-3.9.11

Now we will extract the config from the running Linode kernel and update it in case there’s need.

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$ zcat /proc/config.gz > .config
$ make oldconfig

Mixing AUFS in³

I’ll go fast over this, as it’s almost off-topic. You can skip to the next heading if you are not interested.

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$ git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/aufs/aufs3-standalone aufs3-standalone.git
$ cd aufs3-standalone.git
$ git checkout origin/aufs3.9
$ cd ../linux-3.9.11/
$ patch -p1 < ../aufs3-standalone.git/aufs3-kbuild.patch
$ patch -p1 < ../aufs3-standalone.git/aufs3-base.patch
$ patch -p1 < ../aufs3-standalone.git/aufs3-proc_map.patch
$ patch -p1 < ../aufs3-standalone.git/aufs3-standalone.patch
$ cp -a ../aufs3-standalone.git/{Documentation,fs} .
$ cp -a ../aufs3-standalone.git/include/uapi/linux/aufs_type.h include/uapi/linux/
$ cp -a ../aufs3-standalone.git/include/linux/aufs_type.h include/linux/

Compiling

Great, finally we do our customizations to the config with make menuconfig (you’ll need libncurses5-dev) and compile. (I enabled AUFS in Misc filesystems and the things listed in the lxc-checkconfig source code)

Ah, you might want to change the name of the kernel to something like 3.9.11-custom. You can do that by editing the following Makefile line like this:

EXTRAVERSION = -custom

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$ make
# make modules_install
# make install

Installing

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# apt-get install grub-legacy-ec2
# sed -i 's/indomU=true/indomU=false/' /boot/grub/menu.lst
# update-grub-legacy-ec2

And that’s it! Now go to the Linode Manager, edit your Configuration Profile to use pv-grub-x86_64 as the “Kernel” and reboot.

You should be able to verify what you are running with uname -a, and if you need to see/interact with the boot process, the Lish console is like being in front of a screen. Have fun! (And why did we start in the first place…? Ah, Docker!)

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filosottile@li593-45:~$ uname -a
Linux li593-45 3.9.11-custom #3 SMP Tue Oct 15 19:57:48 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

NOTE: make sure that the first kernel listed in /boot/grub/menu.lst is your new one, as PV-GRUB boots the first kernel of the list and make install backups existing kernels to *.old copies, and these get positioned first by update-grub. I had a Linode blow up all over my face because of this.