Command 'make modules' doesn't build all modules

Question

I'm running Fedora 14 64 bits.

I cloned the kernel source tree from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git

About a week ago I compiled and upgraded the kernel from 2.6.35 to 2.6.39, it went pretty smoothly, all I did was very straight-forward:

make menuconfig
make oldconfig
make -j8
make modules_install && install

Then I added a dummy system call (I was following this with the Linux Kernel Development book by Robert Love) and tried to compile again, it compiled the kernel fine, but when I issued:

[root@xps420 Kernel]# make modules
CHK     include/linux/version.h
CHK     include/generated/utsrelease.h
CALL    scripts/checksyscalls.sh
Building modules, stage 2.
MODPOST 4 modules

it only made 4 modules, previously there were over 2000 modules.

I thought it was my dummy system call that was causing the problem, I undid all the changes and tried again, with the same result.

Again, the steps I took were:

make menuconfig
make oldconfig
make -j8
make modules ----> suspicious

I'm not sure what is causing this.

EDIT: A little more info, I run make clean before recompiling, but it still only made 4 modules. At one point I did make modules_install, and checked /lib/modules/[ver], only those 4 modules were copied there. I should have stopped there but I went ahead and run make install anyway, it installed the kernel, but was unable to boot with it.

EDIT: I just downloaded the stable release (2.6.39.1) from kernel.org, after going thru the steps above, the same thing happened. This is strange. Maybe something in my system is screwing this up :( Hopefully someone has run into this and shed some light.

Answer 1

Ok, after several cups of coffee and lots of googling, I don't know how this all works yet, but looks like when I first upgraded the kernel, the .config was based on the running kernel's config and it includes all the needed modules, therefore it ran fine? Then somehow on the subsequent compilations almost all of the modules were not configured in the .config (except the 4 mentioned above). Long story short, I used the old .config and ran menuconfig to make additional changes, it seems to solve my problem. Thanks!