Is it possible to compile and install a custom kernel (from kernel.org) in sys-net?

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1

Hello everybody,
as a beginner I wanted to ask you something because, as already discussed in another thread, my network card apparently works with some kernels and with others it doesn’t.
From what I understand the vm that manages the network connectivity is sys-net.
If I have connection problems with all currently loaded kernels, would it be possible to install any kernel starting from its .tar.xz downloaded from kernel.org as explained in this page for example? : How to Compile a Linux Kernel - Linux.com.
If this were possible what would be the best procedure to do it and to make it possible to choose it and use it to start the vm sys-net?

Thank you all.

2

Have you tried to see what kernels are currently available for VMs, installed and then (using the qubes manager) selected different versions to run? Do no available kernels support your device (and also does it need proprietary firmware?)

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/managing-vm-kernel/

3

Hi Plexus and thanks for the reply.
At the moment I haven’t tried yet as I wanted to install the latest version of Qubes OS.
I tried with the previous 4.0.3 and I seem to remember that my realtek only worked with the 4.19 kernel (I think this was the version).
Of course I will try with the available versions but I wanted to know if it was also possible to use custom kernels and how to do it best.
Knowing this would allow me to adopt Qubes with greater peace of mind without always having to risk a network stop for any updates.

Thank you

4

Hi @fabiodanzetta ,

installing your own compiled kernel is possible but it requires a lot of skills. You should follow the @Plexus 's advice.
Additional documentation:

Note that the kernel-latest-qubes-vm from current-testing is very recent (5.11.8).

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5

Compiling your own kernel and so on is not a trivial task. But let me just point out that making an hvm-mode qube (so for instance a qube you would use for sys-net) use the default kernel for the template (not the one provided by dom0) is easy. You just set the kernel parameter to "" for this qube, using qvm-prefs in dom0.

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