%general-entities; ]> Host system requirements Due to the experimental nature of the current book, the host must be running at least a 2.6.2 kernel compiled with GCC-3.0 or higher. There are two main reasons for the high requirement. Firstly, we make use of the Native Posix Threading Library (NPTL) whose testsuite will segfault if the host's kernel hasn't been compiled with GCC-3.0 or later. Secondly, the 2.6.2 or later version of the kernel is required for the use of Udev. Udev creates devices dynamically by reading from the sysfs file system. Only very recently has support for this file system been implemented in most of the kernel drivers, however. We must be sure that all the critical system devices get created properly. In order to check that your host kernel meets the requirements outlined above, you can run the following command: cat /proc/version This will produce output similar to:
Linux version 2.6.2 (user@host) (gcc version 3.4.0) #1 Tue Apr 20 21:22:18 GMT 2004
If the results of the above command state that your host kernel wasn't compiled using a GCC-3.0 (or later) compiler, you will need to compile one yourself, and reboot your host to use the newly compiled kernel. Instructions for compiling the kernel and configuring the bootloader (assuming your host uses GRUB) are given in .