Upgrade Linux kernel on RHEL 7

My OS is RHEL 7.2 (minimal installation version). To use some new kernel features (such as BPF), I need to upgrade kernel to 4.x.

(1) Register the system and apply a subscription:

# subscription-manager register --username <username> --password <password> --auto-attach

(2) Use yum install to install the following software packages:

openssl-devel
ncurses-devel
bc
gcc
perl

BTW, when executing yum install perl, it prompts errors, so I download the source code from perl official website, and build it form scratch:

./configure.gnu
make 
make test
make install

(3) Download the stable kernel from kernel.org and extract it, then build it:

make menuconfig
make 
make modules_install install

According to your requirement, maybe installing the header files is also need:

make INSTALL_HDR_PATH=/usr/local headers_install

(4) Reboot system, and select right kernel on boot time, enjoy it:

# uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 4.5.0 #1 SMP Mon Apr 11 09:56:46 EDT 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

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