Re: Rebuilding and checksumming the Linux kernel

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Sun Apr 01 2007 - 14:59:21 EST


On Sun, 2007-04-01 at 15:56 -0300, Edgardo Hames wrote:
> I'm working on a project with teams spread across the world and we all
> work on the same repository patching the kernel and then integrating
> into a common main branch. Even though we label the source code, we
> would like to make sure that we are all building the same kernel by
> running md5sum on the resulting binary.
>
> Right now, this is not possible because the kernel includes a
> timestamp and a build number on the binary. What are this timestamps
> used for? Can we just remove them? Is there any other thing that may
> lead to different binaries? (we are using the exact toolchains and
> build machines, so we can assume that the same executable is generated
> if the input source is the same).

elfutils has a "elfcmp" program that may be useful for you

another trick could be to run objdump -d on the vmlinux, and then
compare the assembly file.. you could even grep out any known date like
things that way,,

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