Debian (and Ubuntu, etc) Kernels for the Acer Aspire One
As I wrote about a couple days ago, I’m now the not-so-proud owner of an Aspire One, running Debian. (I love Debian; I kind of hate the Aspire One.) The current (January 2009) kernels distributed by Debian don’t quite support the full functionality of the Aspire One – one of the biggest issues is that the wifi won’t work. To remedy this, third parties have thoughtfully produced custom kernels for the AAO – the best-known are probably Sickboy’s and Baldrick’s. Both are stripped-down kernels semi-optimized for the hardware in the Aspire One, and both are a bit out-of-date at the moment – Sickboy has 2.6.29.1, and Baldrick offers 2.6.29.1 and 2.6.30.rc5 .
I compiled a custom 2.6.32.2 2.6.32.3 kernel for the AAO, based on Baldrick’s configuration, but with a few changes to suit my needs – and probably those of other AAO users, too.
In addition to the more modern kernel revision, I changed the kernel preemption model to “low-latency desktop”, a/k/a a “preemptible kernel”. It’s debatable whether this will make any real difference, but it can lead to reduced latency (or at least perceived latency) when running some applications, so I think it’s beneficial.
I enabled MTRR cleanup, as this seems to be a persistent BIOS issue with the AAO, and eliminates the need to pass a configuration option to the kernel at boot time.
I added in the “conservative” CPU frequency governor, which might be desirable in an AAO for some people, and enabled the default (“ondemand”) governor, as well.
I added support for writing to NTFS filesystems.
I enabled optimization for the Aspire One’s Atom processor.
I enabled the new Aspire-specific kernel options (i.e. thermal/fan control).
…and a couple other less notable changes.
If you’re comfortable installing a kernel on your AAO running Debian or a derivative (like Ubuntu), and understand the risks of doing so, you can grab a copy of my custom kernel at this link. Like all good things in life, it’s provided as-is without any warranty whatsoever. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
Post comments, et cetera, below…
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Why don’t you provide your .config file so that we can compile the kernel ourselves from the Debian source?
RS: Now that I’ve upgraded to the 2.6.32.3 kernel, I’ve done so; see the link above.
Hi,
thank you for your work. I tried it but it doesn’t boot, it hangs at boot complaining about a missing /sbin/init and saying “no init found. Try passing init= bootarg”.
The strange thing is the menu.lst seems pretty straightforward, the 2.6.32.3 lines are identical to those (perfectly working) of the previous kernel…
Any hint?
Hmmn, I’m not sure. What’s your computer’s model? The error suggests the kernel can’t find the initrd image, but why this is, I can’t say from here. Were there any errors when you installed the kernel?
No, I got no problem installing it. I tried both the .3 and the .4 release.
At first I thought it had something to do with the UUID entry in GRUB menu.lst, but even if I set root=/dev/sda1 it hangs…
I’m trying to install on an Aspire One AOA150 (the one with the hard disk).