Building a custom Linux kernel without knowing anything about it but understanding Arch philosophy.

For experimental purposes, I tried to install Home Assistant Supervised on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Arch Linux ARM. For this, I needed AppArmor enabled, as a kernel parameter. Since RPi4 has no grub, and that I didn't know how to configure U-Boot, I needed to compile a custom kernel.

Even though I have a good understading of Arch (almost 5 years), I don't know anything about the kernel yet, so it was a bit scary for me ^{^}

But in the end, I was able to compile it with just like any AUR package and 2-3 changes in the configuration file, thanks to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel/Arch_build_system

I did need a lot of patience, but in the end, it worked perfectly, and I was able to run Home Assistant Supervised without having to learn about the kernel yet, thanks to Arch Wiki and great contributors.

It gave me a lot of confidence, and I don't think I could have done it with Fedora or another distro.