Gentoo 2008.0 and kernel 2.6.24 build

[cwr]

I've been building the 2008.0 kernel for x86 (actually 686),
Linux version 2.6.24-gentoo-r7, and I've come across a few problems
in the dmesg output which I thought would be worth documenting.

There's an error message "hctosys.c: unable to open rtc device rtc"
which seems to be the result of a change in the fundamental RTC
driver architecture. The old RTC drivers are under Device Drivers
=> Character devices => Enhanced Real Time Clock Support, and don't
play nicely with the new drivers. I dropped them, and also next entry,
=> Generic /dev/rtc emulation, though I don't know if that's necessary.
The new ones are under their own Device Drivers => Real Time Clock section.
I used the => PC-style 'CMOS' Platform RTC driver, and added all the
RTC interfaces, and that seems to work.

However, there may still be timing problems somewhere; there's another
error message "Marking TSC unstable due to TSC halts in idle" where
TSC is the Time Stamp Counter. This message is said to be harmless,
or mostly harmless ... I haven't tested exact timing, or even playing
music, on the new kernel so there may still be problems.

There's also a couple of error messages "Driver sd needs updating -
please use bus_type methods", repeated for "Driver sr". These are
known to be harmless.

Finally there's the message "pnpacpi: exceeded the maximum number of
memory resources: 12" which I think is a real bug. I don't know why
the number of devices has increased, but the #define is in:
/usr/src/linux/include/linux/pnp.h
where PNP_MAX_MEM needs to be increased from 12. I set it to 16.

This has definitely been one of the rougher installs.

Good luck - Will