Building Linux Kernel without Repartitioning

How开发者_JAVA技巧 should I go about building and testing the Linux kernel without repartitioning my system, or is that a requirement if I want to maintain my current setup?

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You can stuff several hundred kernels into your /boot/ directory, assuming you created it large enough when you partitioned your drive. If /boot isn't its own filesystem, then it will share your root /, and that is typically 8-12 gigabytes in size, and frequently has four to six gigabytes free, which will hold a lot of kernels. :)

If the modifications to your kernel have the very real potential to corrupt data, you might wish to use kvm+qemu for your testing kernels. Of course, it's quite hard to test hardware this way; there's nothing quite like having a 'crashbox' with no important data on it when you're performing hardware-driver testing.