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I have downloaded the newest most stable Linux kernel, 2.6.33.2.

I thought I would test this using VirtualBox. So I create a dynamically sized harddisk of 4 GB. And installed CentOS 5.3 with just the minimum packages.

I setup the make menuconfig with just the default settings.

After that I ran make and got the following error: 

net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o: final close failed: No space left on device
make[2]: *** [net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [net/bluetooth] Error 2
make: *** [net] Error 2

The amount of space I have left is:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      3.3G  3.3G     0 100% /
/dev/hda1              99M   12M   82M  13% /boot
tmpfs                 125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm

My virtual size is 4 GB, but the actual size is 3.5 GB.

$ ls -hl
total 7.5G
-rw-------. 1 root root 3.5G 2010-04-13 14:08 LFS.vdi

How much size should I give when compiling and installing a Linux kernel? Are there any guidelines to follow when doing this? This is my first time, so just experimenting with this.

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5 Answers 5

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An april 2010 linux kernel is about 60MB bzip2 archive, which after unpacking and compiling takes about 400-500MB.

You can check your directory size with du -hs like:

/mnt/storage/linux-2.6.33$ du -hs                               
437M    .
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  • 1
    Hello, if that is the case then why is all my disk space being used up. I have allocated a 4gb harddisk and only installed CentOS with only the development tools and libraries. Shouldn't take up that much disk space. When I installed CentSO I just setup 1 partition for root and nothing else. Any problem with that?
    – ant2009
    Commented Apr 13, 2010 at 10:40
  • You can investigate what is eating your space with du -h --max-depth=1 run in your root directory (/). Take the biggest directory, go into it, repeat. Do this untill you find your disk hogs.
    – Ivan Petrushev
    Commented Apr 15, 2010 at 5:40
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    To list files in current dir sorted by size use ls -lhS, and to see top 10 biggest file in the current dir use ls -lhS|head -10.
    – Ivan Petrushev
    Commented Apr 15, 2010 at 5:41
  • 4
    The problem is with the space being used while compiling, not unpacking, methinks.
    – Nikana Reklawyks
    Commented Jun 29, 2013 at 7:52
  • Confirming, most space is used while compiling.
    – lethalman
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 12:59
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On my recent AMD64 build of 4.4.0-57 on Ubuntu 16.04, I needed about 14.5 GB of space for the build outputs.

That seems a a lot and it seems that is mostly transiently needed files (e.g., .o files resulting from compiling a .c file).

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Refer to this link >> https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2266609

I compiled/made linux kernel 4.0.0-rc1 on my HP Stream 13 (2GB RAM, dual core Intel Celeron N2840) based on the clear instruction on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/GitKernelBuild, and this is my experience:

After the "git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git" the disk in use in the separate kernel directory: 1691 MB

During the make/compile, the disk space in use went up to 15674 MB. So: more than 15GB ...

Total compile time was: 299 minutes, or 5 hours. Quite long, probably caused by my slow CPU and slow disk.

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  • Git is entirely different beast. You’d usually download a snapshot. The git respository contains the entire history of Kernel development. Also, compiling will never take that long when irrelevant options are deselected.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Oct 15, 2016 at 12:18
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From Guide,

NOTE: If you do not have lot of disk space in /usr/src then you can unpack the kernel source package on any partition where you have free disk space (like /home). Because kernel compile needs lot of disk space for object files like *.o. For this reason the /usr/src/linux MUST be a soft link pointing to your source directory.

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  • This answer also lacks the amount of free disk space (in GB) that is required to compile the kernel: 1.7GB neither 5.4GB aren't enough for building an amd64-3.11.0 kernel on Ubuntu 13.10.
    – Pro Backup
    Commented Mar 12, 2014 at 14:01
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It seems that the size requirement either has increased over the years or is greater for the realtime kernel. My linux-rt-devel directory is ~36GB:

du -sh linux-rt-5.15/
36G     linux-rt-5.15/
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