Building the Linux Kernel in Hudson
So I decided that since Hudson is so cool that I’d try to build something as big as the linux kernel inside it. I put the rpmbuild command for my grsecurity kernel inside and watched my builds fail until I got it just right. I ended up with a small git repo to revision control the spec file, kernel config, and a new Makefile to tie it all together.
Long story short, I now have automated builds of my spec file which is now capable of building the grsecurity kernel, the PaX kernel, and the vanilla kernel, all depending on how you call it: make grsec, make pax, and make vanilla respectively. I have each setup with both 32bit and 64bit builds, each takes two hours to do. So I just commit a change to apply a new grescurity or kernel patch, and 12 hours later I have all the RPMs fresh out of hudson and I don’t have to so much as bat an eyelash for it. Unless, of course, a build fails. If one fails, they’re all liable to fail for the same reason. So I’m gonna need some more build slaves so it doesn’t take as long in the future.
I know, I know, I’m not “using hudson how it is intended” because hudson itself is a build system, and rpmbuild is a seperate build system, so I’m having a build system calling a build system so each build has to “take it from the top”. But I don’t care about what it was designed to do, I care about what it can do.
And it rocks.