Kernel rebuilding week

I upgraded my Mandriva installation and some things are not working right, so it's kernel rebuilding week.

I use cpufreq to slow down the CPU when I'm not doing anything CPU intensive. So I needed that to work (/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies or similar). With the default distro, I get an incorrect frequency list. So I need to build the kernel and tell it what CPU i've got. it looks like the kernel tries to use the powernow K7 module for cpufreq, but /proc/cpuinfo tells me that this CPU is AMD family 6, so I should probably be using the K6 powernow module).

I thought I could use the default distro kernel, but when I do that, the USB keyboard and mouse don't work (very strange). So my first kernel rebuild was just to get usbkbd and usbmouse working correctly. I built a kernel that was pure i386 (for vmplayer, going to test openmosix) and tested with AMD K7, now building one for AMD K6.

There is also a problem with sound. If I use the ALSA driver there is no sound, but if I use the OSS driver, there is sound but I can't change the volume. Not sure what that's about. OSS is fine with me, I don't care very much. There's probably something simple I'm missing there. I just need to figure that out and I'll have sound plus volume control.

Not that that matters very much. the sound on this laptop is ridiculously low in volume, so I'd need to get speakers anyway, and I could control the volume from there :-). But for now, it's a small challenge to either get ALSA working or to get OSS working with volume control. I *did* have ALSA working for a bit there, but I don't remember exactly what I was doing. I might have been playing with a 2.4 kernel for openmosix (but 2.4 doesn't have cpufreq built in and I was too lazy to apply that patch and then fight with openmosix' patch incompatibilities).

One of these days it'll all get done.